He ate dinner there, fed his horses hay and grain, watered them the last minute and started out again, still hoping that some car would be traveling that way. But luck was against him and he was forced to camp that night thirty miles out from Las Vegas.
Long before daylight he was up and on his way again, to take advantage of the few hours before the intense heat of the day began. Jazz was going lame, traveling barefooted at the forced pace Monty required of him. It was nearly five o’clock when he limped into town with the dusty pack roped upon his sweat-encrusted back.
Monty went directly to the depot and climbed the steep stairs to the telegraph office, his spur rowels burring along the boards. He leaned heavily upon the shelf outside the grated window while he wrote two messages with a hand that shook from exhaustion.
The first was addressed to the sheriff of Nye County, notifying him that a man had disappeared in Johnnywater Cañon and that it looked like murder. The other read as follows:
“P. Connolly,
Cons. Grain & Milling Co.,
Los Angeles, Calif.
“Gary Marshall mysteriously missing from Johnnywater evidence points to foul play suspect Hawkins wire instructions.
“M. Girard.”
Monty regretted the probable shock that message would give to Patricia, but he reasoned desperately that she would have to know the worst anyway, and that a telegram never permits much softening of a blow. She might know something about Hawkins that would be helpful. At any rate, he knew of no one so intimately concerned as Patricia.
He waited for his change, asked the operator to rush both messages straight through, and clumped heavily down the stairs. He remounted and made straight for the nearest stable and turned the horses over to the proprietor himself, who he knew would give them the best care possible. After that he went to a hotel, got a room with bath, took a cold plunge and crawled between the hot sheets with the window as wide open as it would go, and dropped immediately into the heavy slumber of complete mental and physical exhaustion.
While Monty was refreshing himself with the cold bath, Gary, squatted on his heels against the wall of his dungeon, was fingering half of a hoarded biscuit and trying to decide whether he had better eat it now and turn a bold face toward starvation, or put it back in the lard bucket and let the thought of it torture him for a few more hours.