He found himself thinking more and more about Steve Carson. The weak-souled Waddell he had come practically to ignore. Waddell had left no impress upon the cañon, at least, so far as Gary was concerned. And that in spite of the fact that he was walking about in Waddell’s boots and trousers, wearing Waddell’s hat, tending Waddell’s pigs. Walking in Waddell’s boots, Gary wondered about Steve Carson, speculated upon his life and his hopes and the things he had put away in his past when he came to Johnnywater to live alone, wholly apart from his fellows. Steve Carson’s hands had built the cabin between the two piñons. Steve Carson--Gary did not attempt any explanation of why he knew it was so--had brought the gold-bearing rock to the cabin. A prospector of sorts, he must have been, to have found gold-bearing rock in that cañon. It was during the forenoon after Gary had returned from Kawich that he obeyed a sudden, inexplicable impulse to follow Faith, the mottled cat. Ever since Gary had come to Johnnywater he had seen Faith go off across the creek after breakfast. Usually she returned in the course of three or four hours, and frequently she brought some small rodent or a bird home with her. Gary had been faintly amused by the pinto cat’s regular hours and settled habits of living. He used to compliment her upon her decorous behavior, stroking her back while she purred on his knee, her paws tucked snugly close to her body. On this morning Gary rose abruptly from the doorstep, and, bareheaded, he followed Faith across the creek and up the bluff. It was hot climbing, but Gary did not think about the heat. Indeed, he was not consciously thinking of anything much. He was simply following Faith up the bluff, because he had got up from the doorstep to follow Faith. Faith climbed up and up quite as if she knew exactly where she was going. Gary, stopping once on a bowlder to breathe for a minute after an unusually stiff bit of climbing, saw the cat look up in the queer way she had of doing. In a minute she went on and Gary followed. It began to look as if Faith meant to climb to the top of the butte. She made her way around the lower edge of a slide, went out of sight into a narrow gulch which Gary, with all his prospecting had never noticed before--or at least had never entered--and reappeared farther up, just under the rim rock where many slides had evidently had their birth. For the first time since he had left the cabin, the cat looked back at Gary, gave an amiable mew and waited a minute before she started on.