Gary hesitated. He was thirsty, and the rapid climb was beginning to tell on him. He looked back down the bluff to the cool green of the grove, and for the first time wondered why he had been such a fool as to follow a cat away up here on a hunting trip in which he could not possibly take any active interest or part. He told himself what a fool he was and said he must be getting goofy himself. But when he moved it was upward, after the cat. He brought up at the foot of a high ledge seamed and cracked as one would never suspect, looking up from below. It was up here somewhere that the Voice always seemed to be located. He stopped and listened, but the whole cañon lay in a somnolent calm under the mounting sun. It looked as if nothing could disturb it; as if there never could be a Voice other than the everyday voices of men. While he stood there wiping his forehead and panting with the heat and the labor of climbing, the red rooster down in the grove began to crow lustily. The sound came faintly up to Gary, linking him lightly to commonplace affairs. A little distance away the cat had curled herself down in a tiny hollow at the edge of the slide. Gary made his way over to her. She opened one eye and regarded him sleepily, gave a lazy purr or two and settled herself again more comfortably. Gary saw, from certain small scratchings in the gravel, that the pinto cat had made this little nest for herself. She had not been hunting at all. She had come to a spot with which she was very familiar. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO THE PAT CONNOLLY MINE Gary decided offhand that he had been neatly sold. He sat down on the loose rubble near Faith and made himself a smoke. The grove and the cabin were hidden from him by the narrow little ridge that looked perfectly smooth from the cañon bottom. But the rest of the cañon--the corral, the potato patch, the alfalfa--lay blocked out in miniature far below him. He stared down upon the peaceful picture it made and wondered why he had climbed all the way up here just following the pinto cat. For the matter of that, his following the cat was not half so purposeless as the cat’s coming had been. He looked down at her curled asleep in her little hollow. It struck him that this must have been her destination each time she crossed the creek and started up the bluff. But why should the cat come away up here every day? Gary did not attempt to explain the vagaries of a cat so eccentric as Faith had proved herself to be. He wondered idly if he were becoming eccentric also, just from constant association with Faith.