Whispering Smith

When Gene and Bob Johnson rode into town, Whispering Smith was sitting in a chair outside the Blackbird, still chatting with Filber, who stood with his arms around a hitching-post, holding fast a mail-order house catalogue. A modest crowd of hangers-on had gathered.

“Here we are, Gene,” exclaimed Smith to the deputy sheriff. “I was looking for steers, but some calves got into the drive. Take him away.”

While the Johnsons were laughing, Smith walked into the Blackbird. He had lost thirty minutes, and in losing them had lost his quarry. Sinclair had disappeared, and Whispering Smith made a virtue of necessity by taking the upsetting of his plans with an unruffled face. There was but one thing more, indeed, to do, and that was to eat his supper and ride away. The street encounter had made so much talk in Oroville that Smith declined Gene Johnson’s invitation to go back to the house. It seemed a convenient time to let any other ambitious rustlers make good if they were disposed to try, and Whispering Smith went for his supper to the hotel where the Williams Cache men made their headquarters.

There was a rise in the atmospheric pressure the moment he entered the hotel office door, and when he walked into the dining-room, some minutes later, the silence was oppressive. Smith looked for a seat. The only vacant place chanced to be at a table where nine men from the Cache sat busy with ham and eggs. It was a trifle awkward, but the only thing to do was to take the vacant chair.

The nine men were actively engaged with knives and forks and spoons when Whispering Smith drew out the empty chair at the head of the table; but nine pairs of hands dropped modestly under the table when he sat down. Coughing slightly to hide his embarrassment and to keep his right hand in touch with his necktie, Whispering Smith looked around the table with the restrained air of a man who has bowed his head and resolved to ask the blessing, but wants to make reasonably sure that the family is listening. A movement at the other tables, among the regular boarders of the hostelry, was apparent almost at once. Appetites began to fail all over the dining-room. Whispering Smith gave his order genially to the confused waitress:

“Bring me two eggs–one fried on one side and one on the other–and coffee.”

There was a general scraping of chairs on the floor as they were pushed back and guests not at the moment interested in the bill of fare started, modestly but firmly, to leave the dining-room. At Whispering Smith’s table there were no second calls for coffee. To stimulate the eating he turned the conversation into channels as reassuring as possible. Unfortunately for his endeavor, the man at the far end of the table reached for a toothpick. It seemed a pleasant way out of the difficulty, and when the run on toothpicks had once begun, all Whispering Smith’s cordiality could not check it. Every man appeared to want a toothpick, and one after another of Whispering Smith’s company deserted him. He was finally left alone with a physician known as “Doc,” a forger and a bigamist from Denver. Smith tried to engage Doc in medical topics. The doctor was not alone frightened but tipsy, and when Smith went so far as to ask him, as a medical man, whether in his opinion the high water in the mountains had any direct connection with the prevalence of falling of the spine among old “residenters” in Williams Cache, the doctor felt of his head as if his brain were turning turtle.

When Whispering Smith raised his knife ostentatiously to bring out a feature of his theory, the doctor raised his knife higher to admit the force of it; and when Whispering Smith leaned his head forward impressively to drive home a point in his assertion, the doctor stretched his neck till his face grew apoplectic. Releasing him at length from the strain, Whispering Smith begged of the staring maid-servant the recipe for the biscuit. When she came back with it he sat all alone, pouring catsup over his griddle-cakes in an abstracted manner, and it so flurried her that she had to go out again to ask whether the gasolene went into the dough or under it.

He played out the play to the end, but when he rode away in the dusk his face was careworn. John Rebstock had told him why Sinclair dodged: there were others whom Sinclair wanted to meet first; and Whispering Smith was again heading on a long, hard ride, and after a man on a better horse, back to the Crawling Stone and Medicine Bend. “There’s others he wants to see first or you’d have no trouble in talking business to-day. You nor no other man will ever get him alive.” But Whispering Smith knew that.

“See that he doesn’t get you alive, Rebstock,” was his parting retort. “If he finds out Kennedy has got the Tower W money, the first thing he does will be to put the Doxology all over you.”

CHAPTER XL

A SYMPATHETIC EAR

When Whispering Smith rode after Sinclair, Crawling Stone Ranch, in common with the whole countryside, had but one interest in life, and that was to hear of the meeting. Riders across the mountain valleys met with but one question; mail-carriers brought nothing in their pouches of interest equal to the last word concerning Sinclair or his pursuer. It was commonly agreed through the mountains that it would be a difficult matter to overhaul any good man riding Sinclair’s steel-dust horses, but with Sinclair himself in the saddle, unless it pleased him to pull up, the chase was sure to be a stern one. Against this to feed speculation stood one man’s record–that of the man who had ridden alone across Deep Creek and brought Chuck Williams out on a buckboard.

Business in Medicine Bend, meantime, was practically suspended. As the centre of all telephone lines the big railroad town was likewise the centre of all rumors. Officers and soldiers to and from the Fort, stage-drivers and cowmen, homesteaders and rustlers, discussed the apprehension of Sinclair. Moreover, behind this effort to arrest one man who had savagely defied the law were ranged all of the prejudices, sympathies, and hatreds of the high country, and practically the whole population tributary to Medicine Bend and the Crawling Stone Valley were friends either to Sinclair or to his pursuer. Behind Sinclair were nearly all the cattlemen, not alone because he was on good terms with the rustlers and protected his friends, but because he warred openly on the sheepmen. The big range interests, as a rule, were openly or covertly friendly to Sinclair, while against him were the homesteaders, the railroad men, the common people, and the men who everywhere hate cruelty and outrage and the making of a lie.

Lance Dunning had never concealed his friendliness for Sinclair, even after hard stories about him were known to be true, and it was this confidence of fellowship that made Sinclair, twenty-four hours after he had left Oroville, ride down the hill trail to Crawling Stone ranch-house.

The morning had been cold, with a heavy wind and a dull sky. In the afternoon the clouds lowered over the valley and a misting rain set in. Dicksie had gone into Medicine Bend on the stage in the morning, and, after a stolen half-hour with McCloud at Marion’s, had ridden home to escape the storm. Not less, but much more, than those about her she was alive to the situation in which Sinclair stood and its danger to those closest to her. In the morning her one prayer to McCloud had been to have a care of himself, and to Marion to have a care of herself; but even when Dicksie left them it seemed as if neither quite felt the peril as she felt it.

In the afternoon the rain, falling steadily, kept her in the house, and she sat in her room sewing until the light failed. She went downstairs. Puss had lighted the grate in the living-room, and Dicksie threw herself into a chair. The sound of hoofs aroused her and she went to a window. To her horror, she saw Sinclair walking with her cousin up to the front door. She ran into the dining-room, and the two men entered the hall and walked into the office. Choking with excitement, Dicksie ran through the kitchen and upstairs to master her agitation.

In the office Sinclair was sitting down before the hot stove with a tumbler of whiskey. “Lance”–he shook his head as he spoke hoarsely–“I want to say my friends have stood by me to a man, but there’s none of them treated me squarer through thick and thin than you have. Well, I’ve had some bad luck. It can’t be helped. Regards!”

He drank, and shook his wet hair again. Four days of hard riding had left no trace on his iron features. Wet to the bone, his eyes flashed with fire. He held the glassful of whiskey in a hand as steady as a spirit-level and tossed it down a throat as cool as dew.

“I want to say another thing, Lance: I had no more intention than a child of hurting Ed Banks. I warned Ed months ago to keep out of this fight; and I never knew he was in it till it was too late. But I’m hoping he will pull through yet, if they don’t kill him in the hospital to spite me. I never recognized the men at all till it was too late. Why, one of them used to work for me! A man with the whole railroad gang in these mountains after him has got to look out for himself or his life ain’t worth a glass of beer. Thank you, Lance, not any more. I saw two men, with their rifles in their hands, looking for me. I hollered at them; but, Lance, I’m rough and ready, as all my friends know, and I will let no man put a drop on me–that I will never do. Ed, before I ever recognized him, raised his rifle; that’s the only reason I fired. Not so full, Lance, not so full, if you please. Well,” he shook his black hair as he threw back his head, “here’s to better luck in worse countries!” He paused as he swallowed, and set the tumbler down. “Lance, I’m saying good-by to the mountains.”

“You’re not going away for good, Murray?”

“I’m going away for good. What’s the use? For two years these railroad cutthroats have been trying to put something on me; you know that. They’ve been trying to mix me up with that bridge-burning at Smoky Creek; Sugar Buttes, they had me there; Tower W–nothing would do but I was there, and they’ve got one of the men in jail down there now, Lance, trying to sweat enough perjury out of him to send me up. What show has a poor man got against all the money there is in the country? I wouldn’t be afraid of a jury of my own neighbors–the men that know me, Lance–any time. What show would I have with a packed jury in Medicine Bend? I could explain anything I’ve done to the satisfaction of any reasonable man. I’m human, Lance; that’s all I say. I’ve been mistreated and I don’t forget it. They’ve even turned my wife against me–as fine a woman as ever lived.”

Lance swore sympathetically. “There’s good stuff in you yet, Murray.”

“I’m going to say good-by to the mountains,” Sinclair went on grimly, “but I’m going to Medicine Bend to-night and tell the man that has hounded me what I think of him before I leave. I’m going to give my wife a chance to do what is right and go with me. She’s been poisoned against me–I know that; but if she does what’s fair and square there’ll be no trouble–no trouble at all. All I want, Lance, is a square deal. What?”

Dicksie with her pulses throbbing at fever-heat heard the words. She stood half-way down the stairs, trembling as she listened. Anger, hatred, the spirit of vengeance, choked in her throat at the sinister words. She longed to stride into the room and confront the murderer and call down retribution on his head. It was no fear of him that restrained her, for the Crawling Stone girl never knew fear. She would have confronted him and denounced him, but prudence checked her angry impulse. She knew what he meant to do–to ride into Medicine Bend under cover of the storm, murder the two he hated, and escape in the night; and she resolved he should never succeed. If she could only get to the telephone! But the telephone was in the room where he sat. He was saying good-by. Her cousin was trying to dissuade him from riding out into the storm, but he was going. The door opened; the men went out on the porch, and it closed. Dicksie, lightly as a shadow, ran into the office and began ringing Medicine Bend on the telephone.

CHAPTER XLI

DICKSIE’S RIDE

When Lance Dunning entered the room ten minutes later, Dicksie stood at the telephone; but the ten minutes of that interval had made quite another creature of his cousin. The wires were down and no one from any quarter gave a response to her frantic ringing. Through the receiver she could hear only the sweep of the rain and the harsh crackle of the wind. Sometimes praying, sometimes fainting, and sometimes despairing, she stood clinging to the instrument, ringing and pounding upon it like one frenzied. Lance looked at her in amazement. “Why, God a’mighty, Dicksie, what’s the matter?”

He called twice to her before she turned, and her words almost stunned him: “Why did you not detain Sinclair here to-night? Why did you not arrest him?”

Lance’s sombrero raked heavily to one side of his face, and one end of his mustache running up much higher on the other did not begin to express his astonishment. “Arrest him? Arrest Sinclair? Dicksie, are you crazy? Why the devil should I arrest Sinclair? Do you suppose I am going to mix up in a fight like this? Do you think I want to get killed? The level-headed man in this country, just at present, is the man who can keep out of trouble, and the man who succeeds, let me tell you, has got more than plenty to do.”

Lance, getting no answer but a fierce, searching gaze from Dicksie’s wild eyes, laid his hand on a chair, lighted a cigar, and sat down before the fire. Dicksie dropped the telephone receiver, put her hand to her girdle, and looked at him. When she spoke her tone was stinging. “You know that man is going to Medicine Bend to kill his wife!”

Lance took the cigar from his mouth and returned her look. “I know no such thing,” he growled curtly.

“And to kill George McCloud, if he can.”

He stared without reply.

“You heard him say so,” persisted Dicksie vehemently.

Lance crossed his legs and threw back the brim of his hat. “McCloud is nobody’s fool. He will look out for himself.”

“These fiendish wires to Medicine Bend are down. Why hasn’t this line been repaired?” she cried, wringing her hands. “There is no way to give warning to any one that he is coming, and you have let him go!”

Lance whirled in his chair. “Damnation! Could I keep him from going?”

“You did not want to; you are keeping out of trouble. What do you care whom he kills to-night!”

“You’ve gone crazy, Dicksie. Your imagination has upset your reason. Whether he kills anybody to-night or not, it’s too late now to make a row about it,” exclaimed Lance, throwing his cigar angrily away. “He won’t kill us.”

“And you expect me to sit by and fold my hands while that wretch sheds more blood, do you?”

“It can’t be helped.”

“I say it can be helped! I can help it–I will help it–as you could have done if you had wanted to. I will ride to Medicine Bend to-night and help it.”

Lance jumped to his feet, with a string of oaths. “Well this is the limit!” He pointed his finger at her. “Dicksie Dunning, you won’t stir out of this house to-night.”

Her face hardened. “How dare you speak in that way to me? Who are you, that you order me what to do, where to stay? Am I your cowboy, to be defiled with your curses?”

He looked at her in amazement. She was only eighteen; he would still face her down. “I’ll tell you who I am. I am master here, and you will do as I tell you. You will ride to Medicine Bend to-night, will you?” He struck the table with his clinched fist. “Do you hear me? I say, by God, not a horse shall leave this ranch in this storm to-night to go anywhere for anybody or with anybody!”

“Then I say to you this ranch is my ranch, and these horses are my horses! From this hour forth I will order them to go and come when and where I please!” She stepped toward him. “Henceforward I am mistress here. Do you hear me? Henceforward I give orders in Crawling Stone House, and every one under this roof takes orders from me!”

“Dicksie, what do you mean? For God’s sake, you’re not going to try to ride–”

She swept from the room. What happened afterward she could never recall. Who got Jim for her or whether she got the horse up herself, what was said to her in low, kindly words of warning by the man at Jim’s neck when she sprang into the saddle, who the man was, she could not have told. All she felt at last was that she was free and out under the black sky, with the rain beating her burning face and her horse leaping fearfully into the wind.

No man could have kept the trail to the pass that night. The horse took it as if the path flashed in sunshine, and swung into the familiar stride that had carried her so many times over the twenty miles ahead of them. The storm driving into Dicksie’s face cooled her. Every moment she recollected herself better, and before her mind all the aspects of her venture ranged themselves. She had set herself to a race, and against her rode the hardest rider in the mountains. She had set herself to what few men on the range would have dared and what no other woman on the range could do. “Why have I learned to ride,” went the question through her mind, “if not for this–for those I love and for those who love me?” Sinclair had a start, she well knew, but not so much for a night like this night. He would ride to kill those he hated; she would ride to save those she loved. Her horse already was on the Elbow grade; she knew it from his shorter spring–a lithe, creeping spring that had carried her out of deep canyons and up long draws where other horses walked. The wind lessened and the rain drove less angrily in her face. She patted Jim’s neck with her wet glove, and checked him as tenderly as a lover, to give him courage and breath. She wanted to be part of him as he strove, for the horror of the night began to steal on the edge of her thoughts. A gust drove into her face. They were already at the head of the pass, and the horse, with level ground underfoot, was falling into the long reach; but the wind was colder.

Dicksie lowered her head and gave Jim the rein. She realized how wet she was; her feet and her knees were wet. She had no protection but her skirt, though the meanest rider on all her countless acres would not have braved a mile on such a night without leather and fur. The great lapels of her riding-jacket, reversed, were buttoned tight across her shoulders, and the double fold of fur lay warm and dry against her heart and lungs; but her hands were cold, and her skirt dragged leaden and cold from her waist, and water soaked in upon her chilled feet. She knew she ought to have thought of these things. She planned, as thought swept in a moving picture across her brain, how she would prepare again for such a ride–with her cowboy costume that she had once masqueraded in for Marion, with leggings of buckskin and “chaps” of long white silken wool. It was no masquerade now–she was riding in deadly earnest; and her lips closed to shut away a creepy feeling that started from her heart and left her shivering.

She became conscious of how fast she was going. Instinct, made keen by thousands of saddle miles, told Dicksie of her terrific pace. She was riding faster than she would have dared go at noonday and without thought or fear of accident. In spite of the sliding and the plunging down the long hill, the storm and the darkness brought no thought of fear for herself; her only fear was for those ahead. In supreme moments a horse, like a man when human efforts become superhuman, puts the lesser dangers out of reckoning, and the faculties, set on a single purpose, though strained to the breaking-point, never break. Low in her saddle, Dicksie tried to reckon how far they had come and how much lay ahead. She could feel her skirt stiffening about her knees, and the rain beating at her face was sharper; she knew the sleet as it stung her cheeks, and knew what next was coming–the snow.

There was no need to urge Jim. He had the rein and Dicksie bent down to speak to him, as she often spoke when they were alone on the road, when Jim, bolting, almost threw her. Recovering instantly, she knew they were no longer alone. She rose alert in her seat. Her straining eyes could see nothing. Was there a sound in the wind? She held her breath to listen, but before she could apprehend Jim leaped violently ahead. Dicksie screamed in an agony of terror. She knew then that she had passed another rider, and so close she might have touched him.

Fear froze her to the saddle; it lent wings to her horse. The speed became wild. Dicksie knit herself to her dumb companion and a prayer choked in her throat. She crouched lest a bullet tear her from her horse; but through the darkness no bullet came, only the sleet, stinging her face, stiffening her gloves, freezing her hair, chilling her limbs, and weighting her like lead on her struggling horse. She knew not even Sinclair could overtake her now–that no living man could lay a hand on her bridle-rein–and she pulled Jim in down the winding hills to save him for the long flat. When they struck it they had but four miles to go.

Across the flat the wind drove in fury. Reflection, thought, and reason were beginning to leave her. She was crying to herself quietly as she used to cry when she lost herself, a mere child, riding among the hills. She was praying meaningless words. Snow purred softly on her cheeks. The cold was soothing her senses. Unable at last to keep her seat on the horse, she stopped him, slipped stiffly to the ground, and, struggling through the wind as she held fast to the bridle and the horn, half walked and half ran to start the blood through her benumbed veins. She struggled until she could drag her mired feet no farther, and tried to draw herself back into the saddle. It was almost beyond her. She sobbed and screamed at her helplessness. At last she managed to climb flounderingly back into her seat, and, bending her stiffened arms to Jim’s neck, she moaned and cried to him. When again she could hold her seat no longer, she fell to the horse’s side, dragged herself along in the frozen slush, and, screaming with the pain of her freezing hands, drew herself up into the saddle.

She knew that she dare not venture this again–that if she did so she could never remount. She felt now that she should never live to reach Medicine Bend. She rode on and on and on–would it never end? She begged God to send a painless death to those she rode to save, and when the prayer passed her failing senses a new terror awakened her, for she found herself falling out of the saddle. With excruciating torment she recovered her poise. Reeling from side to side, she fought the torpor away. Her mind grew clearer and her tears had ceased. She prayed for a light. The word caught between her stiffened lips and she mumbled it till she could open them wide and scream it out. Then came a sound like the beating of great drums in her ears. It was the crash of Jim’s hoofs on the river bridge, and she was in Medicine Bend.

A horse, galloping low and heavily, slued through the snow from Fort Street into Boney, and, where it had so often stopped before, dashed up on the sidewalk in front of the little shop. The shock was too much for its unconscious rider, and, shot headlong from her saddle, Dicksie was flung bruised and senseless against Marion’s door.

CHAPTER XLII

AT THE DOOR

She woke in a dream of hoofs beating at her brain. Distracted words fell from her lips, and when she opened her swollen eyes and saw those about her she could only scream.

Marion had called up the stable, but the stablemen could only tell her that Dicksie’s horse, in terrible condition, had come in riderless. While Barnhardt, the railway surgeon, at the bedside administered restoratives, Marion talked with him of Dicksie’s sudden and mysterious coming. Dicksie, lying in pain and quite conscious, heard all, but, unable to explain, moaned in her helplessness. She heard Marion at length tell the doctor that McCloud was out of town, and the news seemed to bring back her senses. Then, rising in the bed, while the surgeon and Marion coaxed her to lie down, she clutched at their arms and, looking from one to the other, told her story. When it was done she swooned, but she woke to hear voices at the door of the shop. She heard as if she dreamed, but at the door the words were dread reality. Sinclair had made good his word, and had come out of the storm with a summons upon Marion and it was the surgeon who threw open the door and saw Sinclair standing in the snow.