The telegram to the sheriff at Tonopah arrived while the sheriff was hunting down a murderer elsewhere. His deputy read the wire and speared it face down upon a bill-hook already half filled with a conglomerate mass of other communications. The deputy was not inclined to attach much significance to the message. He frequently remarked that if the sheriff’s office got all fussed up over every yarn that came in, the county would be broke inside a month paying mileage and salary to a dozen deputies. Monty had not said that a man had been murdered. He merely suspected something of the sort. The deputy slid down deeper into the armchair he liked best, cocked his feet higher on the desk and filled his pipe. Johnnywater Cañon and the possible fate of the man who had disappeared from there entered not at all into his somnolent meditations.
The telegram to Patricia reached the main office in Los Angeles after five o’clock. The clerk who telephones the messages called up the office of the Consolidated Grain & Milling Company and got no reply after repeated ringing. Patricia’s telegram was therefore held until office hours the next morning. A messenger boy delivered it last, on his first trip out that way with half-a-dozen messages. The new stenographer was not at first inclined to take it, thinking there must be some mistake. The new manager was in conference with an important customer and she was afraid to disturb him with a matter so unimportant. And since she had quarreled furiously with the bookkeeper just the day before, she would not have spoken to him for anything on earth. So Patricia’s telegram lay on the desk until nearly noon.
At last the manager happened to stroll into the outer office and picked up the yellow envelope which had not been opened. Being half in love with Patricia—in spite of a wife—he knew at once who “P. Connolly” was. He was a conscientious man though his affections did now and then stray from his own hearthside. He immediately called a messenger and sent the telegram back to the main office with forwarding instructions.
At that time, Gary was standing before the sunny slit at the end of the crosscut, pounding doggedly with the single-jack at the corner of the rock wall. He had given up attempting to use the dulled drill as a gadget. He could no longer strike with sufficient force to make the steel bite into the rock, nor could he land the blow accurately on the head of the drill.
The day before he had managed to crack off a piece of rock twice the width of his hand; and though it had broken too far inside the crosscut to accomplish much in the way of enlarging the opening, Gary was nevertheless vastly encouraged. He could now thrust out his hand to the elbow. He could feel the sun shine hot upon it at midday. He could feel the warm wind in his face when he held it pressed close against the open space. He could even smooth Faith’s sleek head when she scrambled upon the bowlder and peered in at him round-eyed and anxious. The world that day had seemed very close.
But to-day, while the telegram to Patricia was loitering in Los Angeles, the sky over Johnnywater was filled thick with clouds. Daylight came gray into the deep gloom of the crosscut. And Gary could not swing a steady blow, but pounded doggedly at the rock with quick, short-arm strokes like a woodpecker hammering at the bole of a dead tree.
He was obliged to stop often and rest, leaning against the wall with his hunger-sharpened profile like a cameo where the light shone in upon him. He would stand there and pant for a while and then lift the four-pound hammer—grown terribly heavy, lately—and go on pounding unavailingly at the rock.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“NOBODY KNOWS BUT A PINTO CAT”
Patricia liked Kansas City even less than she had anticipated. She dragged herself through the heat to the office each morning, worried somehow through her work and returned to her room too utterly depressed and weary to seek what enjoyment lay close at hand. A little park was just across the street, but Patricia could not even summon sufficient interest to enter it. Every cloud that rose over the horizon was to her imagination a potential cyclone, which she rather hoped would sweep her away. She thought she would like to be swept into a new world; and if she could leave her memory behind her she thought that life might be almost bearable.
No mail had been forwarded to her from Los Angeles, and the utter silence served to deepen her general pessimism. And then, an hour before closing time on the hottest day she had ever experienced in her life, here came the telegram for P. Connolly.