Gary had been imprisoned in the crosscut eight days, counting the time until noon. He had stretched his lunch to the third day; human endurance could not compass a longer abstinence than that, so long as the smallest crumb remained. He had drunk perhaps a quart of water from the canteen he had carried up the bluff the day before the catastrophe, and had left the canteen there, expecting to use it for drilling. With a fresh canteen filled that morning at the creek, he had something over three gallons to begin with. Wherefore the tortures of thirst had not yet assailed him, though he had from the first hour held himself rigidly to the smallest ration he thought he could endure and keep his reason. Through all the dragging hours, fighting indomitably against despair when hope seemed but a form of madness, he had never once yielded to temptation and taken more during any one day than he had fixed as the amount that must suffice. He had almost resigned himself to death. And then Faith, unwittingly playing providence, had roused a fighting demon within him. The wild dove had won back a little of his failing strength just when a matter of hours would have pushed him over the edge into lassitude, that lethargy which is nature’s anesthetic when the end approaches, and the final coma which eases a soul across the border. While Patricia slept exhaustedly in the cabin below, Gary babbled of many things in the crosscut. He awoke, believing he had dreamed that an automobile drove into the cañon the evening before. Nevertheless he decided that, since there was no hope of cutting away the granite wall with his knife, or of lifting the bowlder, Atlas-like, on his shoulders and heaving it out of the incline shaft, he might as well use what strength and breath he had in shouting. “About one chance in ten thousand that anybody would hear me,” he told himself. “But getting out alone is a darned sight longer shot. Trick camera work--and the best to be had--it would take, to make me even _look_ like getting out. My best bet is a correct imitation of the Johnnywater Voice. But I wouldn’t advise anybody to bet any money on me.” He was shouting all the while Monty was explaining to Patricia how the Voice had come to give Johnnywater Cañon so sinister a reputation. But his voice came muffled to the outer surface of the bowlder-strewn bluff, and diminished rapidly down the slope. Joe might have heard it had he been awake, since his ears were sufficiently keen to hear Gary when he shouted the night before. But Joe was asleep with his head under the tarp. And Patricia and Monty were talking inside the cabin. So Gary shouted until he could shout no more, and gave up and rested awhile. After that he stood leaning heavily against the wall and scraped doggedly at the seams in the granite with his knife-blade. “----and I love you, Pat. I wouldn’t have you different if I could. Gary.”