Whispering Smith

“We must.”

“Then you will have to go in boats,” said Whispering Smith.

“But the hill road?”

“There is five feet of water across it in half a dozen places. I swam my horse through, so I ought to know.”

“It is all back-water, of course, Miss Dunning,” explained McCloud. “Not dangerous.”

“But moist,” suggested Whispering Smith, “especially in the dark.”

McCloud looked at Marion. “Then let’s be sensible,” he said. “You and Miss Dunning can have my tent as soon as we have supper.”

“Supper!”

“Supper is served to all on duty at twelve o’clock, and we’re on duty, aren’t we? They’re about ready to serve now; we eat in the tent,” he added, holding out his hand as he heard the patter of raindrops. “Rain again! No matter, we shall be dry under canvas.”

Dicksie had never seen an engineers’ field headquarters. Lanterns lighted the interior, and the folding-table in the middle was strewn with papers which McCloud swept off into a camp-chest. Two double cots with an aisle between them stood at the head of the tent, and, spread with bright Hudson Bay blankets, looked fresh and undisturbed. A box-table near the head-pole held an alarm-clock, a telegraph key, and a telephone, and the wires ran up the pole behind it. Leather jackets and sweaters lay on boxes under the tent-walls, and heavy boots stood in disorderly array along the foot of the cots. These McCloud, with apologies, kicked into the corners.

“Is this where you stay?” asked Dicksie.

“Four of us sleep in the cots, when we can, and an indefinite number lie on the ground when it rains.”

Marion looked around her. “What do you do when it thunders?”

The two men were pulling boxes out for seats; McCloud did not stop to look up. “I crawl under the bed–the others don’t seem to mind it.”

“Which is your bed?”

“Whichever I can crawl under quickest. I usually sleep there.” He pointed to the one on the right.

“I thought so. It has the blanket folded back so neatly, just as if there were sheets under it. I’ll bet there aren’t any.”

“Do you think this is a summer resort? Knisely, my assistant, sleeps there, but of course we are never both in bed at the same time; he’s down the river to-night. It’s a sort of continuous performance, you know.” McCloud looked at Dicksie. “Take off your coat, won’t you, please?”

Whispering Smith was trying to drag a chest from the foot of the cot, and Marion stood watching. “What are you trying to do?”

“Get this over to the table for a seat.”

“Silly man! why don’t you move the table?”

Dicksie was taking off her coat. “How inviting it all is!” she smiled. “And this is where you stay?”

“When it rains,” answered McCloud. “Let me have your hat, too.”

“My hair is a sight, I know. We rode over rocks and up gullies into the brush–”

“And through lakes–oh, I know! I can’t conceive how you ever got here at all. Your hair is all right. This is camp, anyway. But if you want a glass you can have one. Knisely is a great swell; he’s just from school, and has no end of things. I’ll rob his bag.”

“Don’t disturb Mr. Knisely’s bag for the world!”

“But you are not taking off your hat. You seem to have something on your mind.”

“Help me to get it off my mind, will you, please?”

“If you will let me.”

“Tell me how to thank you for your generosity. I came all the way over here to-night to ask you for just the help you have offered, and I could not–it stuck in my throat. But that wasn’t what was on my mind. Tell me what you thought when I acted so dreadfully at Marion’s.”

“I didn’t deserve anything better after placing myself in such a fool position. Why don’t you ask me what I thought the day you acted so beautifully at Crawling Stone Ranch? I thought that the finest thing I ever saw.”

“You were not to blame at Marion’s.”

“I seemed to be, which is just as bad. I am going to start the ‘phones going. It’s up to me to make good, you know, in about four hours with a lot of men and material. Aren’t you going to take off your hat?–and your gloves are soaking wet.”

McCloud took down the receiver, and Dicksie put her hands slowly to her head to unpin her hat. It was a broad hat of scarlet felt rolled high above her forehead, and an eagle’s quill caught in the black rosette swept across the front. As she stood in her clinging riding-skirt and her severely plain scarlet waist with only a black ascot falling over it, Whispering Smith looked at her. His eyes did not rest on the picture too long, but his glance was searching. He spoke in an aside to Marion. Marion laughed as she turned her head from where Dicksie was talking again with McCloud. “The best of it is,” murmured Marion, “she hasn’t a suspicion of how lovely she really is.”

CHAPTER XXI

SUPPER IN CAMP

“Will you never be done with your telephoning?” asked Marion. McCloud was still planning the assembling of the men and teams for the morning. Breakfast and transportation were to be arranged for, and the men and teams and material were to be selected from where they could best be spared. Dicksie, with the fingers of one hand moving softly over the telegraph key, sat on a box listening to McCloud’s conferences and orders.

“Cherry says everything is served. Isn’t it, Cherry?” Marion called to the Japanese boy.

Cherry laughed with a guttural joy.

“We are ready for it,” announced McCloud, rising. “How are we to sit?”

“You are to sit at the head of your own table,” said Marion. “I serve the coffee, so I sit at the foot; and Mr. Smith may pass the beans over there, and Dicksie, you are to pour the condensed milk into the cups.”

“Or into the river, just as you like,” suggested Whispering Smith.

McCloud looked at Marion Sinclair. “Really,” he exclaimed, “wherever you are it’s fair weather! When I see you, no matter how tangled up things are, I feel right away they are coming out. And this man is another.”

“Another what?” demanded Whispering Smith.

“Another care-killer.” McCloud, speaking to Dicksie, nodded toward his companion. “Troubles slip from your shoulders when he swaggers in, though he’s not of the slightest use in the world. I have only one thing against him. It is a physical peculiarity, but an indefensible one. You may not have noticed it, but he is bowlegged.”

“From riding your scrub railroad horses. I feel like a sailor ashore when I get off one. Are you going to eat all the bacon, Mr. McCloud, or do we draw a portion of it? I didn’t start out with supper to-night.”

“Take it all. I suppose it would be useless to ask where you have been to-day?”

“Not in the least, but it would be useless to tell. I am violating no confidence, though, in saying I’m hungry. I certainly shouldn’t eat this stuff if I weren’t, should you, Miss Dunning? And I don’t believe you are eating, by the way. Where is your appetite? Your ride ought to have sharpened it. I’m afraid you are downcast. Oh, don’t deny it; it is very plain: but your worry is unnecessary.”

“If the rain would only stop,” said Marion, “everybody would cheer up. They haven’t seen the sun at the ranch for ten days.”

“This rain doesn’t count so far as the high water is concerned,” said McCloud. “It is the weather two hundred and fifty miles above here that is of more consequence to us, and there it is clear to-night. As long as the tent doesn’t leak I rather like it. Sing your song about fair weather, Gordon.”

“But can the men work in such a downpour?” ventured Dicksie.

The two men looked serious and Marion laughed.

“In the morning you will see a hundred of them marching forward with umbrellas, Mr. McCloud leading. The Japs carry fans, of course.”

“I wish I could forget we are in trouble at home,” said Dicksie, taking the badinage gracefully. “Worrying people are such a nuisance. Don’t protest, for every one knows they are.”

“But we are all in trouble,” insisted Whispering Smith. “Trouble! Why, bless you, it really is a blessing; pretty successfully disguised, I admit, sometimes, but still a blessing. I’m in trouble all the time, right now, up to my neck in trouble, and the water rising this minute. Look at this man,” he nodded toward McCloud. “He is in trouble, and the five hundred under him, they are in all kinds of trouble. I shouldn’t know how to sleep without trouble,” continued Whispering Smith, warming to the contention. “Without trouble I lose my appetite. McCloud, don’t be tight; pass the bread.”

“Never heard him do so well,” declared McCloud, looking at Marion.

“Seriously, now,” Whispering Smith went on, “don’t you know people who, if they were thoroughly prosperous, would be intolerable–simply intolerable? I know several such. All thoroughly prosperous people are a nuisance. That is a general proposition, and I stand by it. Go over your list of acquaintances and you will admit it is true. Here’s to trouble! May it always chasten and never overwhelm us: our greatest bugbear and our best friend! It sifts our friends and unmasks our enemies. Like a lovely woman, it woos us–”

“Oh, never!” exclaimed Marion. “A lovely woman doesn’t woo, she is wooed!”

“What are you looking for, perfection in rhetorical figure? This is extemporaneous.”

“But it won’t do!”

“And asks to be conquered,” suggested Whispering Smith.

“Asks! Oh, scandalous, Mr. Smith!”

“It is easy to see why he never could get any one to marry him,” declared McCloud over the bacon.

“Hold on, then! Like lovely woman, it does not seek us, we seek it,” persisted the orator, “That at least is so, isn’t it?”

“It is better,” assented Marion.

“And it waits to be conquered. How is that?”

Marion turned to Dicksie. “You are not helping a bit. What do you think?”

“I don’t think woman and trouble ought to be associated even in figure; and I think ‘waits’ is horrid,” and Dicksie looked gravely at Whispering Smith.

McCloud, too, looked at him. “You’re in trouble now yourself.”

“And I brought it on myself. So we do seek it, don’t we? And trouble, I must hold, is like woman. ‘Waits’ I strike out as unpleasantly suggestive; let it go. So, then, trouble is like a lovely woman, loveliest when conquered. Now, Miss Dunning, if you have a spark of human kindness you won’t turn me down on that proposition. By the way, I have something put down about trouble.”

He was laughing. Dicksie asked herself if this could be the man about whom floated so many accusations of coldness and cruelty and death. He drew a note-book from a waistcoat pocket.

“Oh, it’s in the note-book! There comes the black note-book,” exclaimed McCloud.

“Don’t make fun of my note-book!”

“I shouldn’t dare.” McCloud pointed to it as he spoke to Dicksie. “You should see what is in that note-book: the record, I suppose, of every man in the mountains and of a great many outside.”

“And countless other things,” added Marion.

“Such as what?” asked Dicksie.

“Such as you, for example,” said Marion.

“Am I a thing?”

“A sweet thing, of course,” said Marion ironically. “Yes, you; with color of eyes, hair, length of index finger of the right hand, curvature of thumb, disposition–whether peaceable or otherwise, and prison record, if any.”

“And number of your watch,” added McCloud.

“How dreadful!”

Whispering Smith eyed Dicksie benignly. “They are talking this nonsense to distract us, of course, but I am bound to read you what I have here, if you will graciously submit.”

“Submit? I wait to hear it,” laughed Dicksie.

“My training in prosody is the slightest, as will appear,” he continued, “and synecdoche and Schenectady were always on the verge of getting mixed when I went to school. My sentiment may be termed obvious, but I want to offer a slight apology on behalf of trouble; it is abused too much. I submit this

“SONG TO TROUBLE“Here’s to the measure of every man’s worth, Though when men are wanting it grieves us.Hearts that are hollow we’re better without, Hearts that are loyal it leaves us.“Trouble’s the dowry of every man’s birth, A nettle adversity flings us;It yields to the grip of the masterful hand, When we play coward it stings us.

“Chorus.”

“Don’t say chorus; that’s common.”

“I have to say chorus. My verses don’t speak for themselves, and no one would know it was a chorus if I didn’t explain. Besides, I’m short a line in the chorus, and that is what I’m waiting for to finish the song.

“Chorus:“Then here’s to the bumper that proves every friend! And though in the drinking it wrings us,Here’s to the cup that we drain to the end, And here’s to–

There I stick. I can’t work out the last line.”

“And here’s to the hearts that it brings us!” exclaimed Dicksie.

“Fine!” cried McCloud. “‘Here’s to the hearts that it brings us!’”

Dicksie threw back her head and laughed with the others. Then Whispering Smith looked grave. “There is a difficulty,” said he, knitting his brows. “You have spoiled my song.”

“Oh, Mr. Smith, I hope not! Have I?”

“Your line is so much better than what I have that it makes my stuff sound cheap.”

“Oh, no, Gordon!” interposed McCloud. “You don’t see that one reason why Miss Dunning’s line sounds better than yours is owing to the differences in your voices. If she will repeat the chorus, finishing with her line, you will see the difference.”

“Miss Dunning, take the note-book,” begged Whispering Smith.

“And rise, of course,” suggested McCloud.

“Oh, the note-book! I shall be afraid to hold it. Where are the verses, Mr. Smith? Is this fine handwriting yours?

Then here’s to the bumper that proves every friend!

Isn’t that true?

And though when we drink it it wrings us,

– and it does sometimes!

Here’s to the cup that we drain to the end,

Even women have to be plucky, don’t they, Marion?

And here’s to the hearts that it brings us!”

Whispering Smith rose before the applause subsided. “I ask you to drink this, standing, in condensed milk.”

“Have we enough to stand in?” interposed Dicksie.

“If we stand together in trouble, that ought to be enough,” observed McCloud.

“We’re doing that without rising, aren’t we?” asked Marion. “If we hadn’t been in trouble we shouldn’t have ventured to this camp to-night.”

“And if you had not put me to the trouble of following you–and it was a lot of trouble!–I shouldn’t have been in camp to-night,” said Whispering Smith.

“And if I had not been in trouble this camp wouldn’t have been here to-night,” declared McCloud. “What have we to thank for it all but trouble?”

A voice called the superintendent’s name through the tent door. “Mr. McCloud?”

“And there is more trouble,” added McCloud. “What is it, Bill?”

“Twenty-eight and nine tenths on the gauge, sir.”

McCloud looked at his companions. “I told you so. Up three-tenths. Thank you, Bill; I’ll be with you in a minute. Tell Cherry to come and take away the supper things, will you? That is about all the water we shall get to-night, I think. It’s all we want,” added McCloud, glancing at his watch. “I’m going to take a look at the river. We shall be quiet now around here until half-past three, and if you, Marion, and Miss Dunning will take the tent, you can have two hours’ rest before we start. Bill Dancing will guard you against intrusion, and if you want ice-water ring twice.”

CHAPTER XXII

A TALK WITH WHISPERING SMITH

When Whispering Smith had followed McCloud from the tent, Dicksie turned to Marion and caught her hand. “Is this the terrible man I have heard about?” she murmured. “And I thought him ferocious! But is he as pitiless as they say, Marion?”

Marion laughed–a troubled little laugh of surprise and sadness. “Dear, he isn’t pitiless at all. He has unpleasant things to do, and does them. He is the man on whom the railroad relies to repress the lawlessness that breaks out in the mountains at times and interferes with the operating of the road. It frightens people away, and prevents others from coming in to settle. Railroads want law and order. Robbery and murders don’t make business for railroads. They depend on settlers for developing a country, don’t you know; otherwise they would have no traffic, not to speak of wanting their trains and men let alone. When Mr. Bucks undertook to open up this country to settlers, he needed a man of patience and endurance and with courage and skill in dealing with lawless men, and no man has ever succeeded so well as this terrible man you have heard about. He is terrible, my dear, to lawless men, not to any one else. He is terrible in resource and in daring, but not in anything else I know of, and I knew him when he was a boy and wore a big pink worsted scarf when he went skating.”

“I should like to have seen that scarf,” said Dicksie reflectively. She rose and looked around the tent. In a few minutes she made Marion lie down on one of the cots. Then she walked to the front of the tent, opened the flap, and looked out.

Whispering Smith was sitting before the fire. Rain was falling, but Dicksie put on her close-fitting black coat, raised the door-flap, and walked noiselessly from the tent and up behind him. “Alone in the rain?” she asked.

She had expected to see him start at her voice, but he did not, though he rose and turned around. “Not now,” he answered as he offered her his box with a smile.

“Are you taking your hat off for me in the rain? Put it on again!” she insisted with a little tone of command, and she was conscious of gratification when he obeyed amiably.

“I won’t take your box unless you can find another!” she said. “Oh, you have another! I came out to tell you what a dreadful man I thought you were, and to apologize.”

“Never mind apologizing. Lots of people think worse than that of me and don’t apologize. I’m sorry I have no shelter to offer you, except to sit on this side and take the rain.”

“Why should you take the rain for me?”

“You are a woman.”

“But a stranger to you.”

“Only in a way.”

Dicksie gazed for a moment at the fire. “You won’t think me abrupt, will you?” she said, turning to him, “but, as truly as I live, I cannot account for you, Mr. Smith. I guess at the ranch we don’t know what goes on in the world. Everything I see of you contradicts everything I have heard of you.”

“You haven’t seen much of me yet, you know, and you may have heard much better accounts of me than I deserve. Still, it isn’t surprising you can’t account for me; in fact, it would be surprising if you could. Nobody pretends to do that. You must not be shocked if I can’t even account for myself. Do you know what a derelict is? A ship that has been abandoned but never wholly sinks.”

“Please don’t make fun of me! How did you happen to come into the mountains? I do want to understand things better.”

“Why, you are in real earnest, aren’t you? But I am not making fun of you. Do you know President Bucks? No? Too bad! He’s a very handsome old bachelor. And he is one of those men who get all sorts of men to do all sorts of things for them. You know, building and operating railroads in this part of the country is no joke. The mountains are filled with men that don’t care for God, man, or the devil. Sometimes they furnish their own ammunition to fight with and don’t bother the railroad for years; at such times the railroad leaves them alone. For my part, I never quarrel with a man that doesn’t quarrel with the road. Then comes a time when they get after us, shooting our men or robbing our agents or stopping our trains. Of course we have to get busy then. A few years ago they worried Bucks till they nearly turned his hair gray. At that unfortunate time I happened into his office with a letter of introduction from his closest Chicago friend, Willis Howard, prince of good men, the man that made the Palmer House famous–yes. Now I had come out here, Miss Dunning–I almost said Miss Dicksie, because I hear it so much–”

“I should be greatly set up to hear you call me Dicksie. And I have wondered a thousand times about your name. Dare I ask–why do they call you Whispering Smith? You don’t whisper.”

He laughed with abundance of good-humor. “That is a ridiculous accident, and it all came about when I lived in Chicago. Do you know anything about the infernal climate there? Well, in Chicago I used to lose my voice whenever I caught a cold–sometimes for weeks together. So they began calling me Whispering Smith, and I’ve never been able to shake the name. Odd, isn’t it? But I came out to go into the real-estate business. I was looking for some gold-bearing farm lands where I could raise quartz, don’t you know, and such things–yes. I don’t mind telling you this, though I wouldn’t tell it to everybody–”

“Certainly not,” assented Dicksie, drawing her skirt around to sit in closer confidence.

“I wanted to get rich quick,” murmured Whispering Smith, confidentially.

“Almost criminal, wasn’t it?”

“I wanted to have evening clothes.”

“Yes.”

“And for once in my life two pairs of suspenders–a modest ambition, but a gnawing one. Would you believe it? Before I left Bucks’s office he had hired me for a railroad man. When he asked me what I could do, and I admitted a little experience in handling real estate, he brought his fist down on the table and swore I should be his right-of-way man.”

“How about the mining?”

Whispering Smith waved his hand in something of the proud manner in which Bucks could wave his presidential hand. “My business, Bucks said, need not interfere with that, not in the least; he said that I could do all the mining I wanted to, and I have done all the mining I wanted to. But here is the singular thing that happened: I opened up my office and had nothing to do; they didn’t seem to want any right of way just then. I kept getting my check every month, and wasn’t doing a hand’s turn but riding over the country and shooting jack-rabbits. But, Lord, I love this country! Did you know I used to be a cowboy in the mountains years ago? Indeed I did. I know it almost as well as you do. I mined more or less in the meantime. Occasionally I would go to Bucks–you say you don’t know him?–too bad!–and tell him candidly I wasn’t doing a thing to earn my salary. At such times he would only ask me how I liked the job,” and Whispering Smith’s heavy eyebrows rose in mild surprise at the recollection. “One day when I was talking with him he handed me a telegram from the desert saying that a night operator at a lonely station had been shot and a switch misplaced and a train nearly wrecked. He asked me what I thought of it. I discovered that the poor fellow had shot himself, and in the end we had to put him in the insane asylum to save him from the penitentiary–but that was where my trouble began.

“It ended in my having to organize the special service on the whole road to look after a thousand and one things that nobody else had–well, let us say time or inclination to look after: fraud and theft and violence and all that sort of disagreeable thing. Then one day the cat crawled out of the bag. What do you think? That man who is now president of this road had somewhere seen a highly colored story about me in a magazine, a ten-cent magazine, you know. He had spotted me the first time I walked into his office, and told me a long time afterward it was just like seeing a man walk out of a book, and that he had hard work to keep from falling on my neck. He knew what he wanted me for; it was just this thing. I left Chicago to get away from it, and this is the result. It is not all that kind of thing, oh, no! When they want to cross a reservation I have a winter in Washington with our attorneys and dine with old friends in the White House, and the next winter I may be on snowshoes chasing a band of rustlers. I swore long ago I would do no more of it–that I couldn’t and wouldn’t. But it is Bucks. I can’t go back on him. He is amiable and I am soft. He says he is going to have a crown and harp for me some day, but I fancy–that is, I have an intimation–that there will be a red-hot protest at the bar of Heaven,” he lowered his tone, “from a certain unmentionable quarter when I undertake to put the vestments on. By the way, I hear you are interested in chickens. Oh, yes, I’ve heard a lot about you! Bob Johnson, over at Oroville, has some pretty bantams I want to tell you about.”

Whether he talked railroad or chickens, it was all one: Dicksie sat spellbound; and when he announced it was half-past three o’clock and time to rouse Marion, she was amazed.