“The first and the last--I’ll tell a waiting world. Say, I forgot you might be hungry. If this new hay won’t give your horse acute gastritis, why not tie him down by the cabin and carry him a forkful or two? I can’t feature this corral stuck off here by itself where we can’t keep an eye on it. Still, if you say it’s all right, we’ll put him in.” Monty said it was all right, and Gary did not argue. His spirits had reacted to the stimulus of Monty’s presence, and he was conscious now and then of a heady feeling, as if he had been drinking champagne. His laughter was a bit too frequent, a shade too loud to be perfectly normal. The mental pendulum, having been tilted too far in one direction, was swinging quite as far the other way in an effort to adjust itself to normalcy. Monty Girard was not of an analytical temperament, though circumstance had forced him to observe keenly as a matter of self-protection. He apprehended Gary’s mood sufficiently to let him set the tempo of their talk. Gary, he remembered, had been two weeks alone in Johnnywater Cañon. By his own account he was wholly unaccustomed to isolation of any degree. Monty, therefore, accepted Gary’s talkative mood as a perfectly natural desire to make up for lost time. But there was a reserve in Gary’s talk, nevertheless, an invisible boundary which he would not pass and which held Monty Girard within certain well-defined conversational limits. It seemed to pass directly through Gary’s life at Johnnywater, and to shut off completely the things which Monty wanted most to know. Of all the trivial, surface incidents of those two weeks, Gary talked profusely. His amusing efforts to corral the pigs and keep them there; his corraling of the horses on the old Piute’s hard-gaited pony; his rural activities with hoe and irrigating shovel; all these things he described in great detail. But of his mental life in the cañon he would not speak. But Monty Girard was observing, and he watched Gary rather closely during the three days which he spent at Johnnywater. He saw Gary’s lips tighten when, on the second evening just after supper, the Voice shouted unexpectedly from high up on the bluff. He saw a certain look creep into Gary’s eyes, and the three little creases show themselves suddenly between his eyebrows. But the next moment Gary was looking at Monty and laughing as though he had not heard the Voice. Monty Girard, having eyes that saw nearly everything that came within their range of vision, saw also this: He saw Gary frequently rise, walk across the cabin and stand with his back leaning against the wall, facing the place where he had been sitting. He would continue his laughing monologue, perhaps--but his eyes would glance now and then with reluctance toward that place, as if he were testing an impression. After a bit of that, Gary would return and sit down again, resuming his old careless manner. The strange, combative look would leave his eyes and his forehead would smooth itself.