Gary worked for three days, following the quartz and porphyry down
at an incline of forty-five degrees. The vein held true to form, and
the samples he panned each morning never failed to show a drag of
gold after the concentrate. It was killing work for a man unused to
pick and shovel. In the afternoon of the third day even Gary’s
driving energy began to slow down. He had learned how to drill and
shoot in rock, but the steady swing of the four-pound hammer (miners
call them single-jacks) lamed his right arm so that he could not
strike a forceful blow. Moreover, he discovered that twisting a
drill in rock is not soothing to broken blisters. So, much as he
wanted to make Patricia rich in the shortest possible time,
protesting flesh prevailed upon him to knock off work for the time
being.
He was sitting on the edge of what would one day be an incline
shaft--when he had dug it deep enough--inspecting his blistered hands.
After several days of quiet the wind began to blow in gusts from off
the butte. Somewhere behind Gary and above him there came a
bellowing halloo that made him jump and slide into the open cut.
Again and again came the bellow above him--and after his first
astonishment Gary’s mouth relaxed into a slow grin.
“I’ll bet right there’s the makings of that spook Voice!” he said
aloud. “Up there in the rim rock somewhere.”
He climbed out of the cut and stood facing the cliff, listening. At
close quarters the call became a bellow with only a faint
resemblance to a Voice shouting hello. He remembered now that on
that first morning when he had searched for the elusive “man” on the
bluff, the wind had died before he had climbed very high. After that
he had not heard the Voice again that day.
He made his way laboriously up to the rim rock, listening always to
locate the exact source of the sound. The bluff was almost
perpendicular just under the rim, and huge bowlders lay where they
had fallen in some forgotten time from the top. Gary scrambled over
the first of these and confronted a narrow aperture which seemed to
lead back into the cliff. The opening was perhaps three feet wide at
the bottom, drawing in to a pointed roof a few feet above his head.
The Voice did not seem to come from this opening, but Gary’s
curiosity was roused. He went into the cave. Fifteen feet, as he
paced the distance, brought him to the rear wall--and to a small
recess where a couple of boxes sat side by side with a three-pound
coffee can on top and a bundle wrapped in canvas. Gary forgot the
Voice for the time being and began to investigate the cache.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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