The voice at Johnnywater

by B. M. Bower

Wherefore, Gary dragged his suit case from under the bed, found the papers, lighted another match and burned them. When that was done to his satisfaction, he lay down again and went to sleep. Books might be written—and possibly have been—about hunches, their origin and value, if any. Gary’s nightmare and the strong impulse afterward to guard against danger, took a wrong turning somewhere. He provided against a danger which did not exist in reality and felt an instant relief. And soon after sunrise he shouldered a full canteen, stuffed a five-pound lard bucket as full of lunch as he could cram it, got a handful of fresh candles and went blithely up the bluff to meet the greatest danger that had ever threatened him in his life.

He had driven the crosscut in a good twelve feet by now, and he was proud of his work. The vein seemed to be widening a bit, and the values still held. Already he had an ore dump which he estimated should bring Patricia almost as much money as she had paid for Johnnywater. He hoped there was more than that in the dump, but he was clinging to the side of conservatism. If the claim yielded no more than that, he could still feel that he had done Patricia a real service. To-day he carried his gold dust knotted in a handkerchief in his pocket, lest his nightmare should come true and James Blaine Hawkins should return to rob him. He even carried the mortar and pestle to the shed and threw them down in a corner with the gold pan tucked under some steel traps, so that no one could possibly suspect that they had been used lately.

He was thinking of James Blaine Hawkins while he drilled the four holes in the face of the crosscut. He stopped to listen and looked down the cañon and out as far as he could see into the desert when he went up into the hot sunlight to get the powder, fuse and caps from the cave to load the holes. As he sat in the shade crimping the caps on the four lengths of fuse, a vague uneasiness grew upon him.

“I got a hunch he’ll turn up to-day—and maybe bring some strong-arm guy with him,” Gary said to himself. “Just so he doesn’t happen along in time to hear the shots up here, I don’t know what harm he could do. He never could find this place, even if he got some hint there was a mine somewhere. Anyway, I could hear him drive up the cañon, all right.”

Still he was charging his mental disturbance to James Blaine Hawkins—which proves how inaccurate a “hunch” may be. He carried his four loads to the incline shaft and let himself carefully down, the explosive cuddled in one arm while he steadied himself with the other. At the bottom he noticed his second canteen lying in the full glare of the sun and moved it inside the crosscut with the other canteen and his lunch. It was an absent-minded act, since he would presently move everything outside clear of flung rocks from the blasting.

Still fighting the vague depression that seemed the aftermath of his nightmare, Gary loaded the holes with more care than usual, remembering that he was playing with death whenever he handled that old powder. He flung shovel and pick toward the opening, split the fuse ends with his knife and turned to hurry out of the shaft.

He faced the opening just in time to see it close as a great bowlder dropped into the shaft, followed by the clatter of smaller rocks.

Instinctively Gary recoiled and got the smell of the burning fuse in his nostrils. Without conscious thought of what he must do, he whipped out his knife, tore open a blade and cut the fuses, one by one, close to the rock. He stamped upon them—though they were harmless, writhing there on the floor of the crosscut until the powder was exhausted.

Not until the last fuse stopped burning did Gary approach the blocked opening to see how badly he was trapped. A little rift of sunlight showed at the upper right-hand corner. The rest was black, solid rock. Gary felt the rock all over with his hands, then stooped and lifted his lunch and the two canteens and set them farther back in the crosscut, as if he feared they might yet be destroyed.

He moved the candle here and there above the floor, looking desperately for his pick and shovel. But the heave he had given them had sent them out into the shaft directly in the path of the falling bowlder. He searched the crosscut for other tools, and found his single-jack leaning against the wall where he had dropped it; beside it were two of the shorter drills, the bits nicked and dull.