Gary turned his head abruptly and looked back, exactly as he would
have done had a man approached and stood at his shoulder. He was
conscious of a slight feeling of surprise that the man of whom he
was thinking did not stand there beside him.
“I’ll be getting ’em too, if I don’t look out,” he snorted, and
dumped the mottled cat unceremoniously on the floor.
It has been said by many that thoughts are things. Certainly Gary’s
thoughts that evening seemed live things. While he was washing the
dishes and sweeping the cabin floor, he more than once glanced up,
expecting to see the man who looked like a miner. The picture he had
conjured seemed a living personality, unseen, unheard, but
nevertheless present there in the cabin.
Gary was an essentially practical young man, not much given to
fanciful imaginings. He did not believe in anything to which one may
permissibly attach the word psychic. Imagination of a sort he had
possessed since he was a youngster, and stories he could weave with
more or less originality. He did not, therefore, run amuck in a maze
of futile conjecturing. He believed in hunches, and there his belief
stopped short, satisfied to omit explanations.
That night fell pitch black, with inky clouds pushing out over the
rim rock and a wind from the west that bellowed across the cañon and
whipped the branches of the pines near the cabin. Above the clouds
played the lightning, the glare of it seeping through between the
folds and darting across small open spaces.
Gary sat in the doorway watching the clouds with the lightning
darting through. True to his type and later training, he was
thinking what a wonderful storm scene it would make in a picture.
And then, without warning, he heard a voice shouting a loud halloo
from the bluff. Again it called, and ended with a wail of pain.
Gary started. He turned his face to the cañon side and listened,
deep lines between his eyebrows. It was almost a week since he had
heard the call, and it did not seem natural that the man should be
shouting again from the same point on the bluff. He had been so sure
that the fellow, whoever he was, had left the cañon that first
night. It was absolutely illogical that he should return without
coming near the cabin.
Gary got up and stood irresolute in the doorway. The voice was
insistent, calling again and again a summons difficult to resist.
“Hel_lo-oo-ooh_! Hel_lo-oo-ooh_!” called the voice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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