Whispering Smith

McCloud saw there was no escape from telling of his meeting with Dicksie Dunning, of her warning, and of his ride to the gate with her. Every point brought a suppressed exclamation from Whispering Smith. “So she gave you your life,” he mused. “Good for her! If you had got into the pass on time you could not have got away–the cards were stacked for you. He overestimated you a little, George; just a little. Good men make mistakes. The sport of circumstances that we are! The sport of circumstances!”

“Now tell me how you heard so much about it, Gordon, and where?”

“Through a friend, but forget it.”

“Do you know who shot at me?”

“Yes.”

“I think I do, too. I think it was the fellow that shot so well with the rifle at the barbecue–what was his name? He was working for Sinclair, and perhaps is yet.”

“You mean Seagrue, the Montana cowboy? No, you are wrong. Seagrue is a man-killer, but a square one.”

“How do you know?”

“I will tell you sometime–but this was not Seagrue.”

“One of Dunning’s men, was it? Stormy Gorman?”

“No, no, a very different sort! Stormy is a wind-bag. The man that is after you is in town at this minute, and he has come to stay until he finishes his job.”

“The devil! That’s what makes your eyes so bright, is it? Do you know him?”

“I have seen him. You may see him yourself if you want to.”

“I’d like nothing better. When?”

“To-night–in thirty minutes.” McCloud closed his desk. There was a rap at the door.

“That must be Kennedy,” said Smith. “I haven’t seen him, but I sent word for him to meet me here.” The door opened and Kennedy entered the room.

“Sit down, Farrell,” said Whispering Smith easily. “Ve gates?”

“How’s that?”

“Wie geht es? Don’t pretend you can’t make out my German. He is trying to let on he is not a Dutchman,” observed Whispering Smith to McCloud. “You wouldn’t believe it, but I can remember when Farrell wore wooden shoes and lighted his pipe with a candle. He sleeps under a feather-bed yet. Du Sang is in town, Farrell.”

“Du Sang!” echoed the tall man with mild interest as he picked up a ruler and, throwing his leg on the edge of the table, looked cheerful. “How long has Du Sang been in town? Visiting friends or doing business?”

“He is after your superintendent. He has been here since four o’clock, I reckon, and I’ve ridden a hard road to-day to get in in time to talk it over with him. Want to go?”

Kennedy slapped his leg with the ruler. “I always want to go, don’t I?”

“Farrell, if you hadn’t been a railroad man you would have made a great undertaker, do you know that?” Kennedy, slapping his leg, showed his ivory teeth. “You have such an instinct for funerals,” added Whispering Smith.

“Now, Mr. Smith! Well, who are we waiting for? I’m ready,” said Kennedy, taking out his revolver and examining it.

McCloud put on his new hat and asked if he should take a gun. “You are really accompanying me as my guest, George,” explained Whispering Smith reproachfully. “Won’t it be fun to shove this man right under Du Sang’s nose and make him bat his eyes?” he added to Kennedy. “Well, put one in your pocket if you like, George, provided you have one that will go off when sufficiently urged.”

McCloud opened the drawer of the table and took from it a revolver. Whispering Smith reached out his hand for the gun, examined it, and handed it back.

“You don’t like it.”

Smith smiled a sickly approbation. “A forty-five gun with a thirty-eight bore, George? A little light for shock; a little light. A bullet is intended to knock a man down; not necessarily to kill him, but, if possible, to keep him from killing you. Never mind, we all have our fads. Come on!”

At the foot of the stairs Whispering Smith stopped. “Now I don’t know where we shall find this man, but we’ll try the Three Horses.” As they started down the street McCloud took the inside of the sidewalk, but Smith dropped behind and brought McCloud into the middle. They failed to find Du Sang at the Three Horses, and leaving started to round up the street. They visited many places, but each was entered in the same way. Kennedy sauntered in first and moved slowly ahead. He was to step aside only in case he saw Du Sang. McCloud in every instance followed him, with Whispering Smith just behind, amiably surprised. They spent an hour in and out of the Front Street resorts, but their search was fruitless.

“You are sure he is in town?” asked Kennedy. The three men stood deliberating in the shadow of a side street.

“Sure!” answered Whispering Smith. “Of course, if he turns the trick he wants to get away quietly. He is lying low. Who is that, Farrell?” A man passing out of the shadow of a shade tree was crossing Fort Street a hundred feet away.

“It looks like our party,” whispered Kennedy. “No, stop a bit!” They drew back into the shadow. “That is Du Sang,” said Kennedy; “I know his hobble.”

CHAPTER XVII

A TEST

Du Sang had the sidewise gait of a wolf, and crossed the street with the choppy walk of the man out of a long saddle. Being both uncertain and quick, he was a man to slip a trail easily. He travelled around the block and disappeared among the many open doors that blazed along Hill Street. Less alert trailers than the two behind him would have been at fault; but when he entered the place he was looking for, Kennedy was so close that Du Sang could have spoken to him had he turned around.

Kennedy passed directly ahead. A moment later Whispering Smith put his head inside the door of the joint Du Sang had entered, withdrew it, and, rejoining his companions, spoke in an undertone: “A negro dive; he’s lying low. Now we will keep our regular order. It’s a half-basement, with a bar on the left; crap games at the table behind the screen on the right. Kennedy, will you take the rear end of the bar? It covers the whole room and the back door. George, pass in ahead of me and step just to the left of the slot machine; you’ve got the front door there and everything behind the screen, and I can get close to Du Sang. Look for a thinnish, yellow-faced man with a brown hat and a brown shirt–and pink eyes–shooting craps under this window. I’ll shoot craps with him. Is your heart pumping, George? Never mind, this is easy! Farrell, you’re first!”

The dive, badly lighted and ventilated, was counted tough among tough places. White men and colored mixed before the bar and about the tables. When Smith stepped around the screen and into the flare of the hanging lamps, Du Sang stood in the small corner below the screened street window. McCloud, though vitally interested in looking at the man that had come to town to kill him, felt his attention continually wandering back to Whispering Smith. The clatter of the rolling dice, the guttural jargon of the negro gamblers, the drift of men to and from the bar, and the clouds of tobacco smoke made a hazy background for the stoop-shouldered man with his gray hat and shabby coat, dust-covered and travel-stained. Industriously licking the broken wrapper of a cheap cigar and rolling it fondly under his forefinger, he was making his way unostentatiously toward Du Sang. Thirty-odd men were in the saloon, but only two knew what the storm centre moving slowly across the room might develop. Kennedy, seeing everything and talking pleasantly with one of the barkeepers, his close-set teeth gleaming twenty feet away, stood at the end of the bar sliding an empty glass between his hands. Whispering Smith pushed past the on-lookers to get to the end of the table where Du Sang was shooting. He made no effort to attract Du Sang’s attention, and when the latter looked up he could have pulled the gray hat from the head of the man whose brown eyes were mildly fixed on Du Sang’s dice; they were lying just in front of Smith. Looking indifferently at the intruder, Du Sang reached for the dice: just ahead of his right hand, Whispering Smith’s right hand, the finger-tips extended on the table, rested in front of them; it might have been through accident or it might have been through design. In his left hand Smith held the broken cigar, and without looking at Du Sang he passed the wrapper again over the tip of his tongue and slowly across his lips.

Du Sang now looked sharply at him, and Smith looked at his cigar. Others were playing around the semicircular table–it might mean nothing. Du Sang waited. Smith lifted his right hand from the table and felt in his waistcoat for a match. Du Sang, however, made no effort to take up the dice. He watched Whispering Smith scratch a match on the table, and, either because it failed to light or through design, it was scratched the second time on the table, marking a cross between the two dice.

The meanest negro in the joint would not have stood that, yet Du Sang hesitated. Whispering Smith, mildly surprised, looked up. “Hello, Pearline! You shooting here?” He pushed the dice back toward the outlaw. “Shoot again!”

Du Sang, scowling, snapped the dice and threw badly.

“Up jump the devil, is it? Shoot again!” And, pushing back the dice, Smith moved closer to Du Sang. The two men touched arms. Du Sang, threatened in a way wholly new to him, waited like a snake braved by a mysterious enemy. His eyes blinked like a badger’s. He caught up the dice and threw. “Is that the best you can do?” asked Smith. “See here!” He took up the dice. “Shoot with me!” Smith threw the dice up the table toward Du Sang. Once he threw craps, but, reaching directly in front of Du Sang, he picked the dice up and threw eleven. “Shoot with me, Du Sang.”

“What’s your game?” snapped Du Sang, with an oath.

“What do you care, if I’ve got the coin? I’ll throw you for twenty-dollar gold pieces.”

Du Sang’s eyes glittered. Unable to understand the reason for the affront, he stood like a cat waiting to spring. “This is my game!” he snarled.

“Then play it.”

“Look here, what do you want?” he demanded angrily.

Smith stepped closer. “Any game you’ve got. I’ll throw you left-handed, Du Sang.” With his right hand he snapped the dice under Du Sang’s nose and looked squarely into his eyes. “Got any Sugar Buttes money?”

Du Sang for an instant looked keenly back; his eyes contracted in that time to a mere narrow slit; then, sudden as thought, he sprang back into the corner. He knew now. This was the man who held the aces at the barbecue, the railroad man–Whispering Smith. Kennedy, directly across the table, watched the lightning-like move. For the first time the crap-dealer looked impatiently up.

It was a showdown. No one watching the two men under the window breathed for a moment. Whispering Smith, motionless, only watched the half-closed eyes. “You can’t shoot craps,” he said coldly. “What can you shoot, Pearline? You can’t stop a man on horseback.”

Du Sang knew he must try for a quick kill or make a retreat. He took in the field at a glance. Kennedy’s teeth gleamed only ten feet away, and with his right hand half under his coat lapel he toyed with his watch-chain. McCloud had moved in from the slot machine and stood at the point of the table, looking at Du Sang and laughing at him. Whispering Smith threw off all pretence. “Take your hand away from your gun, you albino! I’ll blow your head off left-handed if you pull! Will you get out of this town to-night? If you can’t drop a man in the saddle at two hundred and fifty yards, what do you think you’d look like after a break with me? Go back to the whelp that hired you, and tell him when he wants a friend of mine to send a man that can shoot. If you are within twenty miles of Medicine Bend at daylight I’ll rope you like a fat cow and drag you down Front Street!”

Du Sang, with burning eyes, shrank narrower and smaller into his corner, ready to shoot if he had to, but not liking the chances. No man in Williams Cache could pull or shoot with Du Sang, but no man in the mountains had ever drawn successfully against the man that faced him.

Whispering Smith saw that he would not draw. He taunted him again in low tones, and, backing away, spoke laughingly to McCloud. While Kennedy covered the corner, Smith backed to the door and waited for the two to join him. They halted a moment at the door, then they backed slowly up the steps and out into the street.

There was no talk till they reached the Wickiup office. “Now, will some of you tell me who Du Sang is?” asked McCloud, after Kennedy and Whispering Smith with banter and laughing had gone over the scene.

Kennedy picked up the ruler. “The wickedest, cruelest man in the bunch–and the best shot.”

“Where is your hat, George–the one he put the bullet through?” asked Whispering Smith, limp in the big chair. “Burn it up; he thinks he missed you. Burn it up now. Never let him find out what a close call you had. Du Sang! Yes, he is cold-blooded as a wild-cat and cruel as a soft bullet. Du Sang would shoot a dying man, George, just to keep him squirming in the dirt. Did you ever see such eyes in a human being, set like that and blinking so in the light? It’s bad enough to watch a man when you can see his eyes. Here’s hoping we’re done with him!”

CHAPTER XVIII

NEW PLANS

Callahan crushed the tobacco under his thumb in the palm of his right hand. “So I am sorry to add,” he concluded, speaking to McCloud, “that you are now out of a job.” The two men were facing each other across the table in McCloud’s office. “Personally, I am not sorry to say it, either,” added Callahan, slowly filling the bowl of his pipe.

McCloud said nothing to the point, as there seemed to be nothing to say until he had heard more. “I never knew before that you were left-handed,” he returned evasively.

“It’s a lucky thing, because it won’t do for a freight-traffic man, nowadays, to let his right hand know what his left hand does,” observed Callahan, feeling for a match. “I am the only left-handed man in the traffic department, but the man that handles the rebates, Jimmie Black, is cross-eyed. Bucks offered to send him to Chicago to have Bryson straighten his eyes, but Jimmie thinks it is better to have them as they are for the present, so he can look at a thing in two different ways–one for the Interstate Commerce Commission and one for himself. You haven’t heard, then?” continued Callahan, returning to his riddle about McCloud’s job. “Why, Lance Dunning has gone into the United States Court and got an injunction against us on the Crawling Stone Line–tied us up tighter than zero. No more construction there for a year at least. Dunning comes in for himself and for a cousin who is his ward, and three or four little ranchers have filed bills–so it’s up to the lawyers for eighty per cent. of the gate receipts and peace. Personally, I’m glad of it. It gives you a chance to look after this operating for a year yourself. We are going to be swamped with freight traffic this year, and I want it moved through the mountains like checkers for the next six months. You know what I mean, George.”

To McCloud the news came, in spite of himself, as a blow. The results he had attained in building through the lower valley had given him a name among the engineers of the whole line. The splendid showing of the winter construction, on which he had depended to enable him to finish the whole work within the year, was by this news brought to naught. Those of the railroad men who said he could not deliver a completed line within the year could never be answered now. And there was some slight bitterness in the reflection that the very stumbling-block to hold him back, to rob him of his chance for a reputation with men like Glover and Bucks, should be the lands of Dicksie Dunning.

He made no complaint. On the division he took hold with new energy and bent his faculties on the operating problems. At Marion’s he saw Dicksie at intervals, and only to fall more hopelessly under her spell each time. She could be serious and she could be volatile and she could be something between which he could never quite make out. She could be serious with him when he was serious, and totally irresponsible the next minute with Marion. On the other hand, when McCloud attempted to be flippant, Dicksie could be confusingly grave. Once when he was bantering with her at Marion’s she tried to say something about her regret that complications over the right of way should have arisen; but McCloud made light of it, and waved the matter aside as if he were a cavalier. Dicksie did not like it, but it was only that he was afraid she would realize he was a mere railroad superintendent with hopes of a record for promotion quite blasted. And as if this obstacle to a greater reputation were not enough, a wilier enemy threatened in the spring to leave only shreds and patches of what he had already earned.

The Crawling Stone River is said to embody, historically, all of the deceits known to mountain streams. Below the Box Canyon it ploughs through a great bed of yielding silt, its own deposit between the two imposing lines of bluffs that resist its wanderings from side to side of the wide valley. This fertile soil makes up the rich lands that are the envy of less fortunate regions in the Great Basin; but the Crawling Stone is not a river to give quiet title to one acre of its own making. The toil of its centuries spreads beautifully green under the June skies, and the unsuspecting settler, lulled into security by many years of the river’s repose, settles on its level bench lands and lays out his long lines of possession; but the Sioux will tell you in their own talk that this man is but a tenant at will; that in another time and at another place the stranger will inherit his fields; and that the Crawling Stone always comes back for its own.

This was the peril that Glover and McCloud essayed when they ran a three-tenths grade and laid an eighty-pound rail up two hundred and fifty miles of the valley. It was in local and exclusive territory a rich prize, and they brought to their undertaking not, perhaps, greater abilities than other men, but incomparably greater material resources than earlier American engineers had possessed.

Success such as theirs is cumulative: when the work is done one man stands for it, but it represents the work of a thousand men in every walk of American industry. Where the credit must lie with the engineer who achieves is in the application of these enormous reserves of industrial triumphs to the particular conditions he faces in the problem before him; in the application lies the genius called success, and this is always new. Moreover, men like Glover and McCloud were fitted for a fight with a mountain river because trained in the Western school, where poverty or resource had sharpened the wits. The building of the Crawling Stone Line came with the dawn of a new day in American capital, when figures that had slept in fairies’ dreams woke into every-day use, and when enlarged calculation among men controlling hitherto unheard-of sums of money demanded the best and most permanent methods of construction to insure enduring economies in operating. Thus the constructing of the Crawling Stone Line opened in itself new chapters in Rocky Mountain railroad-building. An equipment of machinery, much of which had never before been applied to such building, had been assembled by the engineers. Steam-shovels had been sent in battalions, grading-machines and dump-wagons had gone forward in trainloads, and an army of men were operating in the valley. A huge steel bridge three thousand feet long was now being thrown across the river below the Dunning ranch.

The winter had been an unusual one even in a land of winters. The season’s fall of snow had not been above an average, but it had fallen in the spring and had been followed by excessively low temperatures throughout the mountains. June came again, but a strange June. The first rise of the Crawling Stone had not moved out the winter frost, and the stream lay bound from bank to bank, and for hundreds of miles, under three feet of ice. When June opened, backward and cold, there had been no spring. Heavy frosts lasting until the middle of the month gave sudden way to summer heat, and the Indians on the upper-valley reservation began moving back into the hills. Then came the rise. Creek after creek in the higher mountains, ice-bound for six months, burst without warning into flood. Soft winds struck with the sun and stripped the mountain walls of their snow. Rains set in on the desert, and far in the high northwest the Crawling Stone lifting its four-foot cap of ice like a bed of feathers began rolling it end over end down the valley. In the Box, forty feet of water struck the canyon walls and ice-floes were hurled like torpedoes against the granite spurs: the Crawling Stone was starting after its own.

When the river rose, the earlier talk of Dunning’s men had been that the Crawling Stone would put an end to the railroad pretensions by washing the two hundred and fifty miles of track back to the Peace River, where it had started. This much in the beginning was easy to predict; but the railroad men had turned out in force to fight for their holdings, and while the ranchers were laughing, the river was flowing over the bench lands in the upper valley.

At the Dunning ranch the confidence of the men in their own security gave way to confusion as the river, spreading behind the ice-jams into broad lakes and bursting in torrents through its barriers, continued to rise. Treacherous in its broad and yellow quiet, lifting its muddy head in the stillness of the night, moving unheard over broad sandy bottoms, backing noiselessly into forgotten channels, stealing through heavy alfalfa pastures, eating a channel down a slender furrow–then, with the soil melting from the root, the plant has toppled at the head, the rivulet has grown a stream; night falls, and in the morning where yesterday smiling miles of green fields looked up to the sun rolls a mad flood of waters: this is the Crawling Stone.

CHAPTER XIX

THE CRAWLING STONE RISE

So sudden was the onset of the river that the trained riders of the big ranch were taken completely aback, and hundreds of head of Dunning cattle were swept away before they could be removed to points of safety. Fresh alarms came with every hour of the day and night, and the telephones up and down the valley rang incessantly with appeals from neighbor to neighbor. Lance Dunning, calling out the reserves of his vocabulary, swore tremendously and directed the operations against the river. These seemed, indeed, to consist mainly of hard riding and hard language on the part of everybody. Murray Sinclair, although he had sold his ranch on the Crawling Stone and was concentrating his holdings on the Frenchman, was everywhere in evidence. He was the first at a point of danger and the last to ride away from the slipping acres where the muddy flood undercut; but no defiance seemed to disturb the Crawling Stone, which kept alarmingly at work.

Above the alfalfa lands on the long bench north of the house the river, in changing its course many years earlier, had left a depression known as Mud Lake. It had become separated from the main channel of the Crawling Stone by a high, narrow barrier in the form of a bench deposited by the receding waters of some earlier flood, and added to by sand-storms sweeping among the willows that overspread it. Without an effective head or definite system of work the efforts of the men at the Stone Ranch were of no more consequence than if they had spent their time in waving blankets at the river. Twenty men riding in together to tell Lance Dunning that the river was washing out the tree claims above Mud Lake made no perceptible difference in the event. Dicksie, though an inexperienced girl, saw with helpless clearness the futility of it all. The alarms and the continual failures of the army of able-bodied men directed by Sinclair and her cousin wore on her spirit. The river rose until each succeeding inch became a menace to the life and property of the ranch, and in the midst of it came the word that the river was cutting into the willows and heading for Mud Lake. All knew what that meant. If the Crawling Stone should take its old channel, not alone were the two square miles of alfalfa doomed: it would sweep away every vestige of the long stacks below the corrals, take the barns, and lap the slope in front of the ranch-house itself.

Terror seized Dicksie. She telephoned in her distress for Marion, begging her to come up before they should all be swept away; and Marion, turning the shop over to Katie Dancing, got into the ranch-wagon that Dicksie had sent and started for the Crawling Stone. The confusion along the river road as the wagon approached the ranch showed Marion the seriousness of the situation. Settlers driven from their homes in the upper valley formed almost a procession of misery-stricken people, making their way on horseback, on foot, and in wagons toward Medicine Bend. With them they were bringing all they had saved from the flood–the little bunch of cows, the wagonload of hogs, the household effects, the ponies–as if war or pestilence had struck the valley.