The voice at Johnnywater

The telephone bell was shrilling insistent summons in his apartment when Gary pushed open the hall door thirty feet away. Even though he took long steps, he hoped the nagging ji...

Gary was lighting a cigarette. If he had learned the “picture value” of holding a pose, he was at least unconscious of his deliberation in waving out the match flame before he r...

A young man of intelligence may absorb a great many psychological truths while helping to build in pictures mock dramas more or less similar to real, human problems. Gary wore a...

One thing which a motion-picture actor may not do and retain the tolerance of any one who knows him is to stop work in the middle of a picture. If there is an unforgivable sin i...

Tonopah as a mining town appealed strongly to Gary’s love of the picturesque. Tonopah is a hilly little town, with a mine in its very middle, and with narrow, crooked streets th...

Please do not picture a level waste of sand and scant sagebrush when you think of the Nevada desert. Barren it is, where water is not to be had; but level it is not, except wher...

Gary got up from his chair three separate times to remove the lamp chimney (using a white cambric handkerchief to protect his manicured fingers from blisters). In the beginning,...

Monty Girard did not return on the second day. A full week dragged itself minute by minute across Johnnywater; days began suddenly with a spurt of color over the eastern rim of...

“I take it all back. There’s a new model of cow called Walking X, that don’t need grass. It has a special food-saving device somewhere in its anatomy, which enables it to subsis...

Since Gary was not a young man of pronounced literary leanings, he failed to chronicle all of the moods and the trivial incidents which borrowed importance from the paucity of l...

“You are the possessor of a possession of which you wittest not. You have a ghost. Wire Conan Doyle, Sir Oliver Lodge and others of their ilk. Ask them what is the best recipe f...

Monty Girard, mounted on a lean-flanked sorrel, came jogging up the trail into Johnnywater Cañon. His eyes, that managed to see everything within their range of vision, roved qu...

A silence significant, almost sinister, fell. Gary rose from the doorsill, took a restless step or two and turned, so that he faced Monty, and the open doorway. He looked past M...

Patricia waited a week. One day at the office when she happened to be alone for half an hour, she jerked the telephone hook off its shelf and looked up Cohen’s studio number. In...

With his beautifully typed AGREEMENT OF CONTRACT in his inner coat pocket, and two hundred dollars of Patricia’s money in his purse, James Blaine Hawkins set out from Los Angele...

“In God’s name, what were you thinking of when you sent this fellow Hawkins over here with a five years’ contract? Couldn’t you see the man’s a crook? Are the lawyers in Los Ang...

Gary had measured his man rather accurately, and his guess hit close to the mark. He slept late that morning, probably because he had lain awake until the morning star looked at...

Gary saddled Jazz, filled the two canteens at the creek, tied some food for himself and rolled barley for Jazz in a flour sack--with a knot tied between to prevent mixing--and r...

He was still hot on the trail and expecting every moment to have his horse shot from under him, when Monty pulled open the door and walked in upon him, swearing affectionately....

Monty rode rather anxiously into Johnnywater Cañon, determined to take whatever means he found necessary to persuade Gary to return to Los Angeles and “make it up with his girl....

Gary had prospected pretty thoroughly the whole cañon, following the theory that some one--he felt that it was probably Steve Carson--had carried that rich, gold-bearing rock do...

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 narro...

“Here’s where Handsome Gary raises a crop of callouses big as birds’ eggs in his mad pursuit of the fickle jade, Fortune. Come on, Faith, doggone you; I want you handy in case t...

Gary went down ten feet at an incline so sharp he could not carry the muck up in the buckets he had expected to use for the purpose. He knew, because he spent two perspiring hou...

The resiliency of youth, aided by the allurement of riches to be gained by digging, drove Gary back up the bluff to his work. Here again circumstances had forced him to continue...

By riding as late as he dared that night, and letting the horses rest until daylight the next morning, and then pushing them forward at top desert speed--which was a steady trai...

Patricia liked Kansas City even less than she had anticipated. She dragged herself through the heat to the office each morning, worried somehow through her work and returned to...

Monty had made up his mind to go on to Los Angeles and see for himself why Patricia would not answer his telegram, when he received the word that she was coming from Kansas City...

He could no longer lift the single-jack to the height of his shoulder, much less strike a blow upon the rock. He leaned against the bowlder and struck a few feeble blows with th...

The left front tire of the town Ford persisted in going flat with a slow valve leak. The driver, a heedless young fellow, had neglected to bring extra valves; so that the tire n...

Having slept well during the night--thanks to Monty’s forethought in bringing a sedative--Patricia woke while the sun was just gilding the top of the butte. The cañon and the gr...

Gary had been imprisoned in the crosscut eight days, counting the time until noon. He had stretched his lunch to the third day; human endurance could not compass a longer abstin...

“Damn you, Faith, where’s my breakfast?” Gary stopped scraping the granite and peered balefully out at the cat, that had just hopped down mewing upon the bowlder in front of him...

Love adapts itself to strange conditions when it must, and men and maids never find it less alluring. Eight days Gary had been imprisoned in the crosscut, and thought it a lifet...