Greater than the loneliness, stronger than his dread of the cañon and the cabin, was his desire to find more of that gold-bearing rock. It would not take much of it to make Pat’s investment in Johnnywater more than profitable. He even climbed to the top of the butte--a heart-breaking effort accomplished at the risk of his neck on the sheer wall of the rim rock. There was no means of knowing just where that porphyry had come from. In some prehistoric eruption it might have been thrown for miles, though Gary did not believe that it had been. The top of the bluff gave no clue whatever. Malapi bowlders strewed much of the surface with outcroppings of country rock. Certainly there was no sign of mineral up there. He tramped the butte for miles, however, and spent two days in doing it. Then, satisfied that the porphyry must be somewhere in the cañon, he renewed his search on the slope. Prospecting here was quite as difficult, because so much of the upper slopes was covered with an overburden of the malapi that formed the rim rock. Portions of the rim would break and slide when the storms beat upon it. Considerable areas of loose rock had formed during the centuries of wear and tear, and if there had been mineral outcroppings they were as effectually hidden as if they had never come to the surface at all. But a strain of persistence which Gary had inherited from pioneering forebears held him somewhat doggedly to the search. He reasoned that he had more time than he knew what to do with, and if a fortune were hidden away in this cañon, it would be inexcusable for him to mope through the days without making any systematic effort to find it. Patricia deserved the best fortune the world had to bestow. To find one for her would, he told himself whimsically, wipe out the stain of owning a profile and a natural marcel wave over his temples. Pat might possibly forgive even his painted eyebrows and painted lashes and painted lips, if he found her a gold mine. So he tramped and scrambled and climbed from one end of the cañon walls to the other, and would not hint to Monty Girard what it was that held him in Johnnywater Cañon. He would not even put his hopes on paper in the long, lonely evenings when he wrote to Patricia. After the jibing letter concerning the millions she might have if she owned a mine as rich as the rock he had found behind the cabin, Gary had not put his search into words even when he talked to Faith.