Whispering Smith Part 2

CHAPTER XVI
AT THE WICKIUP

TWO nights later Whispering Smith rode into Medicine Bend. “I’ve been up around Williams Cache,” he said, answering McCloud’s greeting as he entered the upstairs office. “How goes it?” He was in his riding rig, just as he had come from a late supper.

When he asked for news McCloud told him the story of the trouble with Lance Dunning over the survey, and added that he had referred the matter to Glover. He told then of his unpleasant surprise when riding home afterward.

“Yes,” assented Smith, looking with feverish interest at McCloud’s head; “I heard about it.”

“That’s odd, for I haven’t said a word about the matter to anybody but Marion Sinclair, and you haven’t seen her.”

“I heard up the country. It is great luck that he missed you.”

“Who missed me?”

“The man that was after you.”

“The bullet went through my hat.”

​“Let me see the hat.”

McCloud produced it. It was a heavy, broad-brimmed Stetson, with a bullet-hole cut cleanly through the front and the back of the crown. Smith made McCloud put the hat on and describe his position when the shot was fired. McCloud stood up, and Whispering Smith eyed him and put questions.

“What do you think of it?” asked McCloud when he had done.

Smith leaned forward on the table and pushed McCloud’s hat toward him as if the incident were closed. “There is no question in my mind, and there never has been, but that Stetson puts up the best hat worn on the range.”

McCloud raised his eyebrows. “Why, thank you! Your conclusion clears things so. After you speak a man has nothing to do but guess.”

“But, by Heaven, George,” exclaimed Smith, speaking with unaccustomed fervor, “Miss Dicksie Dunning is a hummer, isn’t she? That child will have the whole range going in another year. To think of her standing up and lashing her cousin in that way when he was browbeating a railroad man!”

“Where did you hear about that?”

“The whole Crawling Stone country is talking about it. You never told me you had a ​misunderstanding with Dicksie Dunning at Marion’s. Loosen up!”

“I will loosen up in the way you do. What scared me most, Gordon, was waiting for the second shot. Why didn’t he fire again?”

“Doubtless he thought he had you the first time. Any man big enough to start after you is not used to shooting twice at two hundred and fifty yards. He probably thought you were falling out of the saddle; and it was dark. I can account for everything but your reaching the pass so late. How did you spend all your time between the ranch and the foothills?”

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.

At noon Marion arrived. The ranch-house was deserted, and the men were all at the river. Puss stuck her head out of the kitchen window, and Dicksie ran out and threw herself into Marion’s arms. Late news from the front had been the worst: the cutting above Mud Lake had weakened the last barrier that held off the river, and every available man was fighting the current at that point.

Marion heard it all while eating a luncheon. ​Dicksie, beset with anxiety, could not stay in the house. The man that had driven Marion over, saddled horses in the afternoon and the two women rode up above Mud Lake, now become through rainfall and seepage from the river a long, shallow lagoon. For an hour they watched the shovelling and carrying of sandbags, and rode toward the river to the very edge of the disappearing willows, where the bank was melting away before the undercut of the resistless current. They rode away with a common feeling—a conviction that the fight was a losing one, and that another day would see the ruin complete.

“Dicksie,” exclaimed Marion—they were riding to the house as she spoke—“I’ll tell you what we can do!” She hesitated a moment. “I will tell you what we can do! Are you plucky?”

Dicksie looked at Marion pathetically.

“If you are plucky enough to do it, we can keep the river off yet. I have an idea. I will go, but you must come along.”

“Marion, what do you mean? Don’t you think I would go anywhere to save the ranch? I should like to know where you dare go in this country that I dare not!”

“Then ride with me over to the railroad camp by the new bridge. We will ask Mr. McCloud to ​bring some of his men over. He can stop the river; he knows how.”

Dicksie caught her breath. “Oh, Marion! that would do no good, even if I could do it. Why, the railroad has been all swept away in the lower valley.”

“How do you know?”

“So every one says.”

“Who is every one?”

“Cousin Lance, Mr. Sinclair—all the men. I heard that a week ago.”

“Dicksie, don’t believe it. You don’t know these railroad men. They understand this kind of thing; cattlemen, you know, don’t. If you will go with me we can get help. I feel just as sure that those men can control the river as I do that I am looking at you—that is, if anybody can. The question is, do you want to make the effort?”

They talked until they left the horses and entered the house. When they sat down, Dicksie put her hands to her face. “Oh, I wish you had said nothing about it! How can I go to him and ask for help now—after Cousin Lance has gone into court about the line and everything? And of course my name is in it all.”

“Dicksie, don’t raise spectres that have nothing to do with the case. If we go to him and ask him for help he will give it to us if he can; if he can’t, ​what harm is done? He has been up and down the river for three weeks, and he has an army of men camped over by the bridge. I know that, because Mr. Smith rode in from there a few days ago.”

“What, Whispering Smith? Oh, if he is there I would not go for worlds!”

“Pray, why not?”

“Why, he is such an awful man!”

“That is absurd, Dicksie.”

Dicksie looked grave. “Marion, no man in this part of the country has a good word to say for Whispering Smith.”

“Perhaps you have forgotten, Dicksie, that you live in a very rough part of the country,” returned Marion coolly. “No man that he has ever hunted down would have anything pleasant to say about him; nor would the friends of such a man be likely to say a good word of him. There are many on the range, Dicksie, that have no respect for life or law or anything else, and they naturally hate a man like Whispering Smith——”

“But, Marion, he killed——”

“I know. He killed a man named Williams a few years ago, while you were at school—one of the worst men that ever infested this country. Williams Cache is named after that man; he made the most beautiful spot in all these mountains a ​nest of thieves and murderers. But did you know that Williams shot down Gordon Smith’s only brother, a trainmaster, in cold blood in front of the Wickiup at Medicine Bend? No, you never heard that in this part of the country, did you? They had a cow-thief for sheriff then, and no officer in Medicine Bend would go after the murderer. He rode in and out of town as if he owned it, and no one dared say a word, and, mind you, Gordon Smith’s brother had never seen the man in his life until he walked up and shot him dead. Oh, this was a peaceful country a few years ago! Gordon Smith was right-of-way man in the mountains then. He buried his brother, and asked the officers what they were going to do about getting the murderer. They laughed at him. He made no protest, except to ask for a deputy United States marshal’s commission. When he got it he started for Williams Cache after Williams in a buckboard—think of it, Dicksie—and didn’t they laugh at him! He did not even know the trails, and imagine riding two hundred miles in a buckboard to arrest a man in the mountains! He was gone six weeks, and came back with Williams’s body strapped to the buckboard behind him. He never told the story; all he said when he handed in his commission and went back to his work was that the man was killed in a fair fight. Hate him! No wonder they hate ​him—the Williams Cache gang and all their friends on the range! Your cousin thinks it policy to placate that element, hoping that they won’t steal your cattle if you are friendly with them. I know nothing about that, but I do know something about Whispering Smith. It will be a bad day for Williams Cache when they start him up again. But what has that to do with your trouble? He will not eat you up if you go to the camp, Dicksie. You are just raising bogies.”

They had moved to the front porch and Marion was sitting in the rocking-chair. Dicksie stood with her back against one of the pillars and looked at her. As Marion finished Dicksie turned and, with her hand on her forehead, looked in wretchedness of mind out on the valley. As far, in many directions, as the eye could reach the waters spread yellow in the flood of sunshine across the lowlands. There was a moment of silence. Dicksie turned her back on the alarming sight. “Marion, I can’t do it!”

“Oh, yes, you can if you want to, Dicksie!” Dicksie looked at her with tearless eyes. “It is only a question of being plucky enough,” insisted Marion.

“Pluck has nothing to do with it!” exclaimed Dicksie in fiery tones. “I should like to know why you are always talking about my not having ​courage! This isn’t a question of courage. How can I go to a man that I talked to as I talked to him in your house and ask for help? How can I go to him after my cousin has threatened to kill him, and gone into court to prevent his coming on our land? Shouldn’t I look beautiful asking help from him?”

Marion rocked with perfect composure. “No, dear, you would not look beautiful asking help, but you would look sensible. It is so easy to be beautiful and so hard to be sensible.”

“You are just as horrid as you can be, Marion Sinclair!”

“I know that, too, dear. All I wanted to say is that you would look very sensible just now in asking help from Mr. McCloud.”

“I don’t care—I won’t do it. I will never do it, not if every foot of the ranch tumbles into the river. I hope it will! Nobody cares anything about me. I have no friends but thieves and outlaws.”

“Dicksie!” Marion rose.

“That is what you said.”

“I did not. I am your friend. How dare you call me names?” demanded Marion, taking the petulant girl in her arms. “Don’t you think I care anything about you? There are people in this country that you have never seen who know you 178 ​and love you almost as much as I do. Don’t let any silly pride prevent your being sensible, dear.” Dicksie burst into tears. Marion drew her over to the settee, and she had her cry out. When it was over they changed the subject. Dicksie went to her room. It was a long time before she came down again, but Marion rocked in patience: she was resolved to let Dicksie fight it out herself.

When Dicksie came down, Marion stood at the foot of the stairs. The young mistress of Crawling Stone Ranch descended step by step very slowly. “Marion,” she said simply, “I will go with you.”

CHAPTER XX
AT THE DIKE

MARION caught her closely to her heart. “I knew you would go if I got you angry, dear. But you are so slow to anger. Mr. McCloud is just the same way. Mr. Smith says when he does get angry he can do anything. He is very like you in so many ways.”

Dicksie was wiping her eyes. “Is he, Marion? Well, what shall I wear?”

“Just your riding-clothes, dear, and a smile. He won’t know what you have on. It is you he will want to see. But I’ve been thinking of something else. What will your Cousin Lance say? Suppose he should object?”

“Object! I should like to see him object after losing the fight himself.” Marion laughed. “Well, do you think you can find the way down there for us?”

“I can find any way anywhere within a hundred miles of here.”

On the 20th of June McCloud did have something of an army of men in the Crawling Stone ​Valley. Of these, two hundred and fifty were in the vicinity of the bridge, the abutments and piers of which were being put in just below the Dunning ranch. Near at hand Bill Dancing, with a big gang, had been for some time watching the ice and dynamiting the jams. McCloud brought in more men as the river continued to rise. The danger line on the gauges was at length submerged, and for three days the main-line construction camps had been robbed of men to guard the soft grades above and below the bridge. The new track up and down the valley had become a highway of escape from the flood, and the track patrols were met at every curve by cattle, horses, deer, wolves, and coyotes fleeing from the waste of waters that spread over the bottoms.

Through the Dunning ranch the Crawling Stone River makes a far bend across the valley to the north and east. The extraordinary volume of water now pouring through the Box Canyon exposed ten thousand acres of the ranch to the caprice of the river, and if at the point of its tremendous sweep to the north it should cut back into its old channel the change would wipe the entire body of ranch alfalfa lands off the face of the valley. With the heat of the lengthening June days a vast steam rose from the chill waters of the river, marking in ominous windings the ​channel of the main stream through a yellow sea which, ignoring the usual landmarks of trees and dunes, flanked the current broadly on either side. Late in the afternoon of the day that Dicksie with Marion sought McCloud, a storm drifted down the Topah Topah Hills, and heavy showers broke across the valley.

At nightfall the rain had passed and the mist lifted from the river. Above the bluffs rolling patches of cloud obscured the face of the moon, but the distant thunder had ceased, and at midnight the valley near the bridge lay in a stillness broken only by the hoarse calls of the patrols and far-off megaphones. From the bridge camp, which lay on high ground near the grade, the distant lamps of the track-walkers could be seen moving dimly.

Before the camp-fire in front of McCloud’s tent a group of men, smoking and talking, sat or lay sprawled on tarpaulins, drying themselves after the long day. Among them were the weather-beaten remnants of the old guard of the mountain-river workers, men who had ridden in the caboose the night that Hailey went to his death, and had fought the Spider Water with Glover. Bill Dancing, huge, lumbering, awkward as a bear and as shifty, was talking, because with no apparent effort he could talk all night, and was a ​valuable man at keeping the camp awake. Bill Dancing talked and, after Sinclair’s name had been dropped from the roll, ate and drank more than any two men on the division. A little apart, McCloud lay on a leather caboose cushion trying to get a nap.

“It was the day George McCloud came,” continued Dancing, spinning a continuous story. “Nobody was drinking—Murray Sinclair started that yarn. I was getting fixed up a little for to meet George McCloud, so I asked the barber for some tonic, and he understood me for to say dye for my whiskers, and he gets out the dye and begins to dye my whiskers. My cigar went out whilst he was shampooing me, and my whiskers was wet up with the dye. He turned around to put down th’ bottle, and I started for to light my cigar with a parlor-match, and, by gum! away went my whiskers on fire—burnt jus’ like a tumbleweed. There was the barbers all running around at once trying for to choke me with towels, and running for water, and me sitting there blazing like a tar-barrel. That’s all there was to that story. I went over to Doc Torpy’s and got bandaged up, and he wanted me for to go to the hospit’l—but I was going for to meet George McCloud.” Bill raised his voice a little and threw his tones carelessly over toward the caboose cushion: “And I was the on’y ​man on the platform when his train pulled in. His car was on the hind end. I walked back and waited for some one to come out. It was about seven o’clock in the evening and they was eating dinner inside, so I set up on the fence for a minute, and who do you think got out of the car? That boy laying right over there. ‘Where’s your dad?’ says I; that’s exactly what I said. ‘Dead,’ says he. ‘Dead!’ says I, surprised-like. ‘Dead,’ says he, ‘for many years.’ ‘Where’s the new superintendent?’ says I. ‘I’m the new superintendent,’ says he. Well, sir, you could have blowed me over with a air-hose. ‘Go ’way,’ I says. ‘What’s the matter with your face, Bill?’ he says, while I was looking at him; now that’s straight. That was George McCloud, right over there, the first time I ever set eyes on him or him on me. The assertion was met with silence such as might be termed marked.

“Bucks told him,” continued Bill Dancing, in corroborative detail, “that when he got to Medicine Bend one man would be waiting for to meet him. ‘He met me,’ says Bucks; ‘he’s met every superintendent since my time; he’ll meet you. Go right up and speak to him,’ Bucks says; ‘it’ll be all right.’”

“Oh, hell, Bill!” protested an indignant chorus.

“Well, what’s er matter with you fellows? ​Didn’t you ask me to tell the story?” demanded Dancing angrily. “If you know it better than I do, tell it! Give me some tobacco, Chris,” said Bill, honoring with the request the only man in the circle who had shown no scepticism, because he spoke English with difficulty. “And say, Chris, go down and read the bridge gauge, will you? It’s close on twelve o’clock, and he’s to be called when it reaches twenty-eight feet. I said the boy could never run the division without help from every man on it, and that’s what I’m giving him, and I don’t care who knows it,” said Bill Dancing, raising his voice not too much. “Bucks says that any man that c’n run this division c’n run any railroad on earth. Shoo! now who’s this coming here on horseback? Clouding up again, too, by gum!”

The man sent to the bridge had turned back, and behind his lantern Dancing heard the tread of horses. He stood at one side of the camp-fire while two visitors rode up; they were women. Dancing stood dumb as they advanced into the firelight. The one ahead spoke: “Mr. Dancing, don’t you know me?” As she stopped her horse the light of the fire struck her face. “Why, Mis’ Sinclair!”

“Yes, and Miss Dunning is with me,” returned Marion. Bill staggered. “This is an awful ​place to get to; we have been nearly drowned, and we want to see Mr. McCloud.”

McCloud, roused by Marion’s voice, came forward. “You were asleep,” said she as he greeted her. “I am so sorry we have disturbed you!” She looked careworn and a little forlorn, yet but a little considering the struggle she and Dicksie had made to reach the camp.

Light blazed from the camp-fire, where Dicksie stood talking with Dancing about horses.

“They are in desperate straits up at the ranch,” Marion went on, when McCloud had assured her of her welcome. “I don’t see how they can save it. The river is starting to flow into the old channel and there’s a big pond right in the alfalfa fields.”

“It will play the deuce with things if it gets through there,” mused McCloud. “I wonder how the river is? I’ve been asleep. O Bill!” he called to Dancing, “what water have you got?”

“Twenty-eight six just now, sir. She’s a-raising very, very slow, Mr. McCloud.”

“So I am responsible for this invasion,” continued Marion calmly. “I’ve been up with Dicksie at the ranch; she sent for me. Just think of it—no woman but old Puss within ten miles of the poor child! And they have been trying everywhere to get bags, and you have all the bags, and the men have been buzzing around over there for a ​week like bumblebees and doing just about as much good. She and I talked it all over this afternoon, and I told her I was coming over here to see you, and we started out together—and merciful goodness, such a time as we have had!”

“But you started out together; where did you leave her?”

“There she stands the other side of the fire. O Dicksie!”

“Why did you not tell me she was here!” exclaimed McCloud.

Dicksie came into the light as he hastened over. If she was uncertain in manner, he was not. He met her, laughing just enough to relieve the tension of which both for an instant were conscious. She gave him her hand when he put his out, though he felt that it trembled a little. “Such a ride as you have had! Why did you not send me word? I would have come to you!” he exclaimed, throwing reproach into the words.

Dicksie raised her eyes. “I wanted to ask you whether you would sell us some grain-sacks, Mr. McCloud, to use at the river, if you could spare them?”

“Sacks? Why, of course, all you want! But how did you ever get here? In all this water, and two lone women! You have been in danger to-night. Indeed you have—don’t tell me! And you ​are both wet; I know it. Your feet must be wet. Come to the fire. O Bill!” he called to Dancing, “what’s the matter with your wood? Let us have a fire, won’t you?—one worth while; and build another in front of my tent. I can’t believe you have ridden here all the way from the ranch, two of you alone!” exclaimed McCloud, hastening boxes up to the fire for seats.

Marion laughed. “Dicksie can go anywhere! I couldn’t have ridden from the house to the barns alone.”

“Then tell me how you could do it?” demanded McCloud, devouring Dicksie with his eyes.

Dicksie looked at the fire. “I know all the roads pretty well. We did get lost once,” she confessed in a low voice, “but we got out again.”

“The roads are all under water, though.”

“What time is it, please?”

McCloud looked at his watch. “Two minutes past twelve.”

Dicksie started. “Past twelve? Oh, this is dreadful! We must start right back, Marion. I had no idea we had been five hours coming five miles.”

McCloud looked at her, as if still unable to comprehend what she had accomplished in crossing the flooded bottoms. Her eyes fell back to the fire. ​“What a blaze!” she murmured as the driftwood snapped and roared. “It’s fine for to-night, isn’t it?”

“I know you both must have been in the water,” he insisted, leaning forward in front of Dicksie to feel Marion’s skirt.

“I’m not wet!” declared Marion, drawing back.

“Nonsense, you are wet as a rat! Tell me,” he asked, looking at Dicksie, “about your trouble up at the bend. I know something about it. Are the men there to-night? Given up, have they? Too bad! Do open your jackets and try to dry yourselves, both of you, and I’ll take a look at the river.”

“Suppose—I only say suppose—you first take a look at me.” The voice came from behind the group at the fire, and the three turned together.

“By Heaven, Gordon Smith!” exclaimed McCloud. “Where did you come from?”

Whispering Smith stood in the gloom in patience. “Where do I look as if I had come from? Why don’t you ask me whether I’m wet? And won’t you introduce me—but this is Miss Dicksie Dunning, I am sure.”

Marion with laughter hastened the introduction.

“And you are wet, of course,” said McCloud, feeling Smith’s shoulder.

“No, only soaked. I have fallen into the river ​two or three times, and the last time a big rhinoceros of yours down the grade, a section foreman named Klein, was obliging enough to pull me out. Oh, no! I was not looking for you,” he ran on, answering McCloud’s question; “not when he pulled me out. I was just looking for a farm or a ladder or something. Klein, for a man named Small, is the biggest Dutchman I ever saw. ‘Tell me, Klein,’ I asked, after he had quit dragging me out—he’s a Hanoverian—‘where did you get your pull? And how about your height? Did your grandfather serve as a grenadier under old Frederick William and was he kidnapped?’ Bill, don’t feed my horse for a while. And Klein tried to light a cigar I had just taken from my pocket and given him—fancy! the Germans are a remarkable people—and sat down to tell me his history, when some friend down the line began bawling through a megaphone, and all that poor Klein had time to say was that he had had no supper, nor dinner, nor yet breakfast, and would be obliged for some by the boat he forwarded me in.” And, in closing, Whispering Smith looked cheerfully around at Marion, at McCloud, and last and longest of all at Dicksie Dunning.

“Did you come from across the river?” asked Dicksie, adjusting her wet skirt meekly over her knees.

​“You are soaking wet,” observed Whispering Smith. “Across the river?” he echoed. “Well, hardly, my dear Miss Dunning! Every bridge is out down the valley except the railroad bridge and there are a few things I don’t tackle; one is the Crawling Stone on a tear. No, this was across a little break in this man McCloud’s track. I came, to be frank, from the Dunning Ranch to look up two women who rode away from there at seven o’clock to-night, and I want to say that they gave me the ride of my life,” and Whispering Smith looked all around the circle and back again and smiled.

Dicksie spoke in amazement. “How did you know we rode away? You were not at the ranch when we left.”

“Oh, don’t ask him!” cried Marion.

“He knows everything,” explained McCloud.

Whispering Smith turned to Dicksie. “I was interested in knowing that they got safely to their destination—whatever it might be, which was none of my business. I happened to see a man that had seen them start, that was all. You don’t understand? Well, if you want it in plain English, I made it my business to see a man who made it his business to see them. It’s all very simple, but these people like to make a mystery of it. Good women are scarcer than riches, and more to be ​prized than fine gold—in my judgment—so I rode after them.”

Marion put her hand for a moment on his coat sleeve; he looked at Dicksie with another laugh and spoke to her because he dared not look toward Marion. “Going back to-night, do you say? You never are.”

Dicksie answered quite in earnest: “Oh, but we are. We must!”

“Why did you come, then? It’s taken half the night to get here, and will take a night and a half at least to get back.”

“We came to ask Mr. McCloud for some grain-sacks—you know, they have nothing to work with at the ranch,” said Marion; “and he said we might have some and we are to send for them in the morning.”

“I see. But we may as well talk plainly.” Smith looked at Dicksie. “You are as brave and as game as a girl can be, I know, or you couldn’t have done this. Sacks full of sand, with the boys at the ranch to handle them, would do no more good to-morrow at the bend than bladders. The river is flowing into Squaw Lake above there now. A hundred men that know the game might check things yet if they’re there by daylight. Nobody else, and nothing else on God’s earth, can.”

There was silence before the fire. McCloud ​broke it: “I can put the hundred men there at daylight, Gordon, if Miss Dunning and her cousin want them,” said McCloud.

Marion sprang to her feet. “Oh, will you do that, Mr. McCloud?”

McCloud looked at Dicksie. “If they are wanted.”

Dicksie tried to look at the fire. “We have hardly deserved help from Mr. McCloud at the ranch,” she said at last.

He put out his hand. “I must object. The first wreck I ever had on this division Miss Dunning rode twenty miles to offer help. Isn’t that true? Why, I would walk a hundred miles to return the offer to her. Perhaps your cousin would object,” he suggested, turning to Dicksie; “but no, I think we can manage that. Now what are we going to do? You two can’t go back to-night, that is certain.”

“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 ​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.

Dawn showed in the east. The men eating breakfast in tents were to be sent on a work-train up a piece of Y-track that led as near as they could be taken to where they were needed. The train had pulled out when Dicksie, Marion, McCloud, and Whispering Smith took horses to get across to the hills and through to the ranch-house. They had ridden slowly for some distance when McCloud was called back. The party returned and rode together into the mists that hung below the bridge. They came out upon a little party of men standing with lanterns on a piece of track where the river had taken the entire grade and raced furiously through the gap. Fog shrouded the light of ​the lanterns and lent gloom to the silence, but the women could see the group that McCloud had joined. Standing above his companions on a pile of ties, a tall young man holding a megaphone waited. Out of the darkness there came presently a loud calling. The tall young man at intervals bawled vigorously into the fog in answer. Far away could be heard, in the intervals of silence, the faint clang of the work-train engine-bell. Again the voice came out of the fog. McCloud took the megaphone and called repeatedly. Two men rowed a boat out of the back-water behind the grade, and when McCloud stepped into it, it was released on a line while the oarsmen guided it across the flood until it disappeared. The two megaphone voices could still be heard. After a time the boat was pulled back again, and McCloud stepped out of it. He spoke a moment with the men, rejoined his party, and climbed into the saddle. “Now we are off,” said he.

“What was it all about?” asked Whispering Smith.

“Your friend Klein is over there. Nobody could understand what he said except that he wanted me. When I got here I couldn’t make out what he was talking about, so they let us out in the boat on a line. Half-way across the break I made out what was troubling him. He said he ​was going to lose three hundred feet of track, and wanted to know what to do.”

“And you told him, of course?”

“Yes.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him to lose it.”

“I could have done that myself.”

“Why didn’t you?”

CHAPTER XXIII
AT THE RIVER

THEY found the ranch-house as Marion and Dicksie had left it, deserted. Puss told them every one was at the river. McCloud did not approve Dicksie’s plan of going down to see her cousin first. “Why not let me ride down and manage it without bringing you into it at all?” he suggested. “It can be done.” And after further discussion it was so arranged.

McCloud and Smith had been joined by Dancing on horseback, and they made their way around Squaw Lake and across the fields. The fog was rolling up from the willows at the bend. Men were chopping in the brush, and McCloud and his companion soon met Lance Dunning riding up the narrow strip of sand that held the river off the ranch.

McCloud greeted Dunning, regardless of his amazement, as if he had parted from him the day before. “How are you making it over here?” he asked. “We are in pretty good shape at the moment down below, and I thought I would ride over to see if we could do anything for you. This ​is what you call pretty fair water for this part of the valley, isn’t it?”

Lance swallowed his astonishment. “This isn’t water, McCloud; this is hell.” He took off his hat and wiped his forehead. “Well, I call this white, anyway, and no mistake—I do indeed, sir! This is Whispering Smith, isn’t it? Glad to see you at Crawling Stone, sir.” Which served not only to surprise but to please Whispering Smith.

“Some of my men were free,” continued McCloud; “I switched some mattresses and sacks around the Y, thinking they might come in play here for you at the bend. They are at your service if you think you need them.”

“Need them!” Lance swore fiercely and from the bottom of his heart. He was glad to get help from any quarter and made no bones about it. Moreover, McCloud lessened the embarrassment by explaining that he had a personal interest in holding the channel where it ran, lest a change above might threaten the approaches already built to the bridge; and Whispering Smith, who would have been on terms with the catfish if he had been flung into the middle of the Crawling Stone, contributed at once, like a reënforced spring, to the ease of the situation.

Lance again took off his hat and wiped the sweat of anxiety from his dripping forehead. ​“Whatever differences of opinion I may have with your damned company, I have no lack of esteem personally, McCloud, for you, sir, by Heaven! How many men did you bring?”

“And whatever wheels you Crawling Stone ranchers may have in your heads on the subject of irrigation,” returned McCloud evenly, “I have no lack of esteem personally, Mr. Dunning, for you. I brought a hundred.”

“Do you want to take charge here? I’m frank, sir; you understand this game and I don’t.”

“Suppose we look the situation over; meantime, all our supplies have to be brought across from the Y. What should you think, Mr. Dunning, of putting all the teams you can at that end of the work?”

“Every man that can be spared from the river shall go at it. Come over here and look at our work and judge for yourself.”

They rode to where the forces assembled by Lance were throwing up embankments and riprapping. There was hurried running to and fro, a violent dragging about of willows, and a good deal of shouting.

Dunning, with some excitement, watched McCloud’s face to note the effect of the activity on him, but McCloud’s expression, naturally reserved, reflected nothing of his views on the subject. ​Dunning waved his hand at the lively scene. “They’ve been at it all night. How many would you take away, sir?”

“You might take them all away, as far as the river is concerned,” said McCloud after a moment.

“What? Hell! All?”

“They are not doing anything, are they, but running around in a circle? And those fellows over there might as well be making mud pies as riprapping at that point. What we need there is a mattress and sandbags—and plenty of them. Bill,” directed McCloud in an even tone of business as he turned to Dancing, “see how quick you can get your gangs over here with what sacks they can carry and walk fast. If you will put your men on horses, Mr. Dunning, they can help like everything. That bank won’t last a great while the way the river is getting under it now.” Dancing wheeled like an elephant on his bronco and clattered away through the mud. Lance Dunning, recovering from his surprise, started his men back for the wagons, and McCloud, dismounting, walked with him to the water’s edge to plan the fight for what was left of the strip in front of the alfalfa fields.

When Whispering Smith got back to the house he was in good-humor. He joined Dicksie and Marion in the dining-room, where they were ​drinking coffee. Afterward Dicksie ordered horses saddled and the three rode to the river. Up and down the bank as far as they could see in the misty rain, men were moving slowly about—more men, it seemed to Dicksie, than she had ever seen together in her life. The confusion and the noise had disappeared. No one appeared to hurry, but every one had something to do, and, from the gangs who with sledges were sinking “dead-men” among the trees to hold the cables of the mattress that was about to be sunk, and the Japs who were diligently preparing to float and load it, to the men that were filling and wheeling the sandbags, no one appeared excited. McCloud joined the visitors for a few moments and then went back to where Dancing and his men on life-lines were guiding the mattress to its resting-place. In spite of the gloom of the rain, which Whispering Smith said was breaking, Dicksie rode back to the house in much better spirits with her two guests; and when they came from luncheon the sun, as Smith had predicted, was shining.

“Oh, come out!” cried Dicksie, at the door. Marion had a letter to write and went upstairs, but Whispering Smith followed Dicksie. “Does everything you say come true?” she demanded as she stood in the sunshine.

She was demure with light-heartedness and he ​looked at her approvingly. “I hope nothing I may say ever will come true unless it makes you happy,” he answered lightly. “It would be a shame if it did anything else.”

She pointed two accusing fingers at him. “Do you know what you promised last night? You have forgotten already! You said you would tell me why my leghorns are eating their feathers off.”

“Let me talk with them.”

“Just what I should like. Come on!” said Dicksie, leading the way to the chicken-yard. “I want you to see my bantams too. I have three of the dearest little things. One is setting. They are over the way. Come see them first. And, oh, you must see my new game chickens. Truly, you never saw anything as handsome as Cæsar—he’s the rooster; and I have six pullets. Cæsar is perfectly superb.”

When the two reached the chicken-houses Dicksie examined the nest where she was setting the bantam hen. “This miserable hen will not set,” she exclaimed in despair. “See here, Mr. Smith, she has left her nest again and is scratching around on the ground. Isn’t it a shame? I’ve tied a cord around her leg so she couldn’t run away, and she is hobbling around like a scrub pony.”

“Perhaps the eggs are too warm,” suggested her companion. “I have had great success in cases like this with powdered ice—not using too ​much, of course; just shave the ice gently and rub it over the eggs one at a time; it will often result in refreshing the attention of the hen.”

Dicksie looked grave. “Aren’t you ashamed to make fun of me?”

Whispering Smith seemed taken aback. “Is it really serious business?”

“Of course.”

“Very good. Let me watch this hen for a few minutes and diagnose her. You go on to your other chickens. I’ll stay here and think.”

Dicksie went down through the yards. When she came back, Whispering Smith was sitting on a cracker-box watching the bantam. The chicken was making desperate efforts to get off Dicksie’s cord and join its companions in the runway. Smith was eying the bantam critically when Dicksie rejoined him. “Do you usually,” he asked, looking suddenly up, “have success in setting roosters?”

“Now you are having fun with me again.”

“No, by Heaven! I am not.”

“Have you diagnosed the case?”

“I have, and I have diagnosed it as a case of mistaken identity.”

“Identity?”

“And misapplied energy. Miss Dicksie, you have tied up the wrong bird. This is not a ​bantam hen at all; this is a bantam rooster. Now that is my judgment. Compare him with the others. Notice how much darker his plumage is—it’s the rooster,” declared Whispering Smith, wiping the perplexity from his brow. “Don’t feel bad, not at all. Cut him loose, Miss Dicksie—don’t hesitate; do it on my responsibility. Now let’s look at the cannibal leghorns—and great Cæsar.”

CHAPTER XXIV
BETWEEN GIRLHOOD AND WOMANHOOD

ABOUT nine o’clock that night Puss ushered McCloud in from the river. Dicksie came running downstairs to meet him. “Your cousin insisted I should come up to the house for some supper,” said McCloud dryly. “I could have taken camp fare with the men. Gordon stayed there with him.”

Dicksie held his hat in her hand, and her eyes were bright in the firelight. Puss must have thought the two made a handsome couple, for she lingered, as she started for the kitchen, to look back.

“Puss,” exclaimed her mistress, “fry a chicken right away! A big one, Puss! Mr. McCloud is very hungry, I know. And be quick, do! Oh, how is the river, Mr. McCloud?”

“Behaving like a lamb. It hasn’t fallen much, but the pressure seems to be off the bank, if you know what that means?”

“You must be a magician! Things changed the minute you came!”

​“The last doctor usually gets credit for the cure, you know.”

“Oh, I know all about that. Don’t you want to freshen up? Should you mind coming right to my room? Marion is in hers,” explained Dicksie, “and I am never sure of Cousin Lance’s,—he has so many boots.”

When she had disposed of McCloud she flew to the kitchen. Puss was starting after a chicken. “Take a lantern, Puss!” whispered Dicksie vehemently.

“No, indeed; dis nigger don’ need no lantern fo’ chickens, Miss Dicksie.”

“But get a good one, Puss, and make haste, do! Mr. McCloud must be starved! Where is the baking powder? I’ll get the biscuits started.”

Puss turned fiercely. “Now look-a heah, yo’ can’t make biscuits! Yo’ jes’ go se’ down wif dat young gen’m’n! Jes’ lemme lone, ef yo’ please! Dis ain’t de firs’ time I killed chickens, Miss Dicksie, an’ made biscuits. Jes’ clair out an’ se’ down! Place f’r young ladies is in de parlor! Ol’ Puss can cook supper f’r one man yet—ef she has to!”

“Oh, yes, Puss, certainly, I know, of course; only, get a nice chicken!” and with the parting admonition Dicksie, smoothing her hair wildly, hastened back to the living-room.

But the harm was done. Puss, more excited ​than her mistress, lost her head when she got to the chicken-yard, and with sufficiently bad results. When Dicksie ran out a few moments afterward for a glass of water for McCloud, Puss was calmly wiping her hands, and in the sink lay the quivering form of young Cæsar. Dicksie caught her favorite up by the legs and suppressed a cry. There could be no mistake. She cast a burning look on Puss. It would do no good to storm now. Dicksie only wrung her hands and returned to McCloud.

He rose in the happiest mood. He could not see what a torment Dicksie was in, and took the water without asking himself why it trembled in her hand. Her restrained manner did not worry him, for he felt that his fight at the river was won, and the prospect of fried chicken composed him. Even the long hour before Puss, calm and inviting in a white cap and apron, appeared to announce supper, passed like a dream. When Dicksie rose to lead the way to the dining-room, McCloud walked on air; the high color about her eyes intoxicated him. Not till half the fried chicken, with many compliments from McCloud, had disappeared, and the plate had gone out for the second dozen biscuits, did he notice Dicksie’s abstraction.

“I’m sure you need worry no longer about the ​water,” he observed reassuringly. “I think the worst of the danger is past.”

Dicksie looked at the table-cloth with wide-open eyes. “I feel sure that it is. I am no longer worrying about that.”

“It’s nothing I can do or leave undone, is it?” asked McCloud, laughing a little as he implied in his tone that she must be worrying about something.

Dicksie made a gesture of alarm. “Oh, no, no; nothing!”

“It’s a pretty good plan not to worry about anything.”

“Do you think so?”

“Why, we all thought so last night. Heavens!” McCloud drew back in his chair. “I never offered you a piece of chicken! What have I been thinking of?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t eat it anyway!” cried Dicksie.

“You wouldn’t? It is delicious. Do have a plate and a wing at least.”

“Really, I could not bear to think of it,” she said pathetically.

He spoke lower. “Something is troubling you. I have no right to a confidence, I know,” he added, taking a biscuit.

Her eyes fell to the floor. “It is nothing. Pray, don’t mind me. May I fill your cup?” she asked, looking up. “I am afraid I worry too much over ​what has happened and can’t be helped. Do you never do that?”

McCloud, laughing wretchedly, tore Cæsar’s last leg from his body. “No indeed. I never worry over what can’t be helped.”

They left the dining-room. Marion came down. But they had hardly seated themselves before the living-room fire when a messenger arrived with word that McCloud was wanted at the river. His chagrin at being dragged away was so apparent that Marion and Dicksie sympathized with him and laughed at him. “‘I never worry about what can’t be helped,’” Dicksie murmured.

He looked at Marion. “That’s a shot at me. You don’t want to go down, do you?” he asked ironically, looking from one to the other.

“Why, of course I’ll go down,” responded Dicksie promptly. “Marion caught cold last night, I guess, so you will excuse her, I know. I will be back in an hour, Marion, and you can toast your cold while I’m gone.”

“But you mustn’t go alone!” protested McCloud.

Dicksie lifted her chin the least bit. “I shall be going with you, shall I not? And if the messenger has gone back I shall have to guide you. You never could find your way alone.”

“But I can go,” interposed Marion, rising.

​“Not at all; you can not go!” announced Dicksie. “I can protect both Mr. McCloud and myself. If he should arrive down there under the wing of two women he would never hear the last of it. I am mistress here still, I think; and I sha’n’t be leaving home, you know, to make the trip!”

McCloud looked at Marion. “I never worry over what can’t be helped—though it is dollars to cents that those fellows don’t need me down there any more than a cat needs two tails. And how will you get back?” he asked, turning to Dicksie.

“I will ride back!” returned Dicksie loftily. “But you may, if you like, help me get my horse up.”

“Are you sure you can find your way back?” persisted McCloud.

Dicksie looked at him in surprise. “Find my way back?” she echoed softly. “I could not lose it. I can ride over any part of this country at noon or at midnight, asleep or awake, with a saddle or without, with a bridle or without, with a trail or without. I’ve ridden every horse that has ever come on the Crawling Stone Ranch. I could ride when I was three years old. Find my way back?”

The messenger had gone when the two rode from the house. The sky was heavily overcast, ​and the wind blew such a gale from the south and west that one could hardly hear what the other said. McCloud could not have ridden from the house to the barn in the utter darkness, but his horse followed Dicksie’s. She halted frequently on the trail for him to come up with her, and after they had crossed the alfalfa fields McCloud did not care whether they ever found the path again or not. “It’s great, isn’t it?” he exclaimed, coming up to her after opening a gate in the dark. “Where are you?”

“This way,” laughed Dicksie. “Look out for the trail here. Give me your hand and let your horse have his head. If he slips, drop off quick on this side.” McCloud caught her hand. They rode for a moment in silence, the horses stepping cautiously. “All right now,” said Dicksie; “you may let go.” But McCloud kept his horse up close and clung to the warm hand. “The camp is just around the hill,” murmured Dicksie, trying to pull away. “But of course if you would like to ride in holding my hand you may!”

“No,” said McCloud, “of course not—not for worlds! But, Miss Dicksie, couldn’t we ride back to the house and ride around the other way into camp? I think the other way into the camp—say, around by the railroad bridge—would be prettier, don’t you?”

​For answer she touched Jim lightly with her lines and his spring released her hand very effectively. As she did so the trail turned, and the camp-fire, whipped in the high wind, blazed before them.

Whispering Smith and Lance Dunning were sitting together as the two galloped up. Smith helped Dicksie to alight. She was conscious of her color and that her eyes were now unduly bright. Moreover, Whispering Smith’s glance rested so calmly on both McCloud’s face and her own that Dicksie felt as if he saw quite through her and knew everything that had happened since they left the house.

Lance was talking to McCloud. “Don’t abuse the wind,” McCloud was saying. “It’s our best friend to-night, Mr. Dunning. It is blowing the water off-shore. Where is the trouble?” For answer Dunning led McCloud off toward the Bend, and Dicksie was left alone with Whispering Smith.

He made a seat for her on the windward side of the big fire. When she had seated herself she looked up in great contentment to ask if he was not going to sit down beside her. The brown coat, the high black hat, and the big eyes of Whispering Smith had already become a part of her mental store. She saw that he seemed ​preoccupied, and sought to draw him out of his abstraction.

“I am so glad you and Mr. McCloud are getting acquainted with Cousin Lance,” she said. “And do you mind my giving you a confidence, Mr. Smith? Lance has been so unreasonable about this matter of the railroad’s coming up the valley and powwowing so much with lawyers and ranchers that he has been forgetting about everything at home. He is so much older than I am that he ought to be the sensible one of the family, don’t you think so? It frightens me to have him losing at cards and drinking. I am afraid he will get into some shooting affair. I don’t understand what has come over him, and I worry about it. I believe you could influence him if you knew him.”

“What makes you think that?” asked Whispering Smith, but his eyes were on the fire.

“Because these men he spends his time with in town—the men who fight and shoot so much—are afraid of you. Don’t laugh at me. I know it is quite true in spite of their talk. I was afraid of you myself until——”

“Until we made verse together.”

“Until you made verse and I spoiled it. But I think it is because I don’t understand things that I am so afraid. I am not naturally a coward. ​I’m sure I could not be afraid of you if I understood things better. And there is Marion. She puzzles me. She will never speak of her husband—I don’t know why. And I don’t know why Mr. McCloud is so hard on Mr. Sinclair—Mr. Sinclair seems so kind and good-natured.”

Whispering Smith looked from the fire into Dicksie’s eyes. “What should you say if I gave you a confidence?”

She opened her heart to his searching gaze. “Would you trust me with a confidence?”

He answered without hesitation. “You shall see. Now, I have many things I can’t talk about, you understand. But if I had to give you a secret this instant that carried my life, I shouldn’t fear to do it—so much for trusting you. Only this, too, as to what I say: don’t ever quote me or let it appear that you any more than know me. Can you manage that? Really? Very good; you will understand why in a minute. The man that is stirring up all this trouble with your Cousin Lance and in this whole country is your kind and good-natured neighbor, Mr. Sinclair. I am prejudiced against him; let us admit that on the start, and remember it in estimating what I say. But Sinclair is the man who has turned your cousin’s head, as well as made things in other ways unpleasant for several of us. Sinclair—I tell you so you will ​understand everything, more than your cousin, Mr. McCloud, or Marion Sinclair understand—Sinclair is a train-wrecker and a murderer. That makes you breathe hard, doesn’t it? but it is so. Sinclair is fairly educated and highly intelligent, capable in every way, daring to the limit, and, in a way, fascinating; it is no wonder he has a following. But his following is divided into two classes: the men that know all the secrets, and the men that don’t—men like Rebstock and Du Sang, and men like your cousin and a hundred or so sports in Medicine Bend, who see only the glamour of Sinclair’s pace. Your cousin sympathizes with Sinclair when he doesn’t actually side with him. All this has helped to turn Sinclair’s head, and this is exactly the situation you and McCloud and I and a lot of others are up against. They don’t know all this, but I know it, and now you know it. Let me tell you something that comes close to home. You have a cowboy on the ranch named Karg—he is called Flat Nose. Karg was a railroad man. He is a cattle-thief, a train-robber, a murderer, and a spy. I should not tell you this if you were not game to the last drop of your blood. But I think I know you better than you know yourself, though you never saw me until last night. Karg is Sinclair’s spy at your ranch, and you must never feel it or know it; but he is ​there to keep your cousin’s sympathy with Sinclair, and to lure your cousin his way. And Karg will try to kill George McCloud every time he sets foot on this ranch, remember that.”

“Then Mr. McCloud ought not to be here. I don’t want him to stay if he is in danger!” exclaimed Dicksie.

“But I do want him to come here as if it mattered nothing, and I shall try to take care of him. I have a man among your own men, a cowboy named Wickwire, who will be watching Karg, and who is just as quick, and Karg, not knowing he was watched, would be taken unawares. If Wickwire goes elsewhere to work some one else will take his place here. Karg is not on the ranch now; he is up North, hunting up some of your steers that were run off last month by his own cronies. Now do you think I am giving you confidence?”

She looked at him steadily. “If I can only deserve it all.” In the distance she heard the calling of the men at the river borne on the wind. The shock of what had been told her, the strangeness of the night and of the scene, left her calm. Fear had given way to responsibility and Dicksie seemed to know herself.

“You have nothing whatever to do to deserve it but keep your own counsel. But listen a moment longer—for this is what I have been leading up ​to,” he said. “Marion will get a message to-morrow, a message from Sinclair, asking her to come to see him at his ranch-house before she goes back. I don’t know what he wants—but she is his wife. He has treated her infamously; that is why she will not live with him and does not speak of him. But you know how strange a woman is—or perhaps you don’t: she doesn’t always cease to care for a man when she ceases to trust him. I am not in Marion’s confidence, Miss Dicksie. She is another man’s wife. I cannot tell how she feels toward him; I know she has often tried to reclaim him from his deviltry. She may try again, that is, she may, for one reason or another, go to him as he asks. I could not interfere, if I would. I have no right to if I could, and I will not. Now this is what I’m trying to get up the courage to ask you. Should you dare to go with her to Sinclair’s ranch if she decides to go to him?”

“Certainly I should dare.”

“After all you know?”

“After all I know—why not?”

“Then in case she does go and you go with her, you will know nothing whatever about anything, of course, unless you get the story from her. What I fear is that which possibly may come of their interview. He may try to kill her—don’t be frightened. He will not succeed if you can only make ​sure he doesn’t lead her away on horseback from the ranch-house or get her alone in a room. She has few friends. I respect and honor her because she and I grew up as children together in the same little town in Wisconsin. I know her folks, all of them, and I’ve promised them—you know—to have a kind of care of her.”

“I think I know.”

He looked self-conscious even at her tone of understanding. “I need not try to deceive you; your instinct would be poor if it did not tell you more than I ought to. He came along and turned her head. You need fear nothing for yourself in going with her, and nothing for her if you can cover just those two points—can you remember? Not to let her go away with him on horseback, and not to leave her where she will be alone with him in the house?”

“I can and will. I think as much of Marion as you do. I am proud to be able to do something for you. How little I have known you! I thought you were everything I didn’t want to know.”

“It’s nothing,” he returned easily, “except that Sinclair has stirred up your cousin and the ranchers as well as the Williams Cache gang, and that makes talk about me. I have to do what I can to make this a peaceable country to live in. The ​railroad wants decent people here and doesn’t want the other kind, and it falls on me, unfortunately, to keep the other kind moving. I don’t like it, but we can none of us do quite what we please in making a living. Let me tell you this”—he turned to fix his eyes seriously on hers: “Believe anything you hear of me except that I have ever taken human life willingly or save in discharge of my duty. But this kind of work makes my own life an uncertainty, as you can see. I do almost literally carry my life in my hand, for if my hand is not quicker every time than a man’s eye, I am done for then and there.”

“It is dreadful to think of.”

“Not exactly that, but it is something I can’t afford to forget.”

“What would become of the lives of the friends you protect if you were killed?”

“You say you care for Marion Sinclair. I should like to think if anything should happen to me you wouldn’t forget her?”

“I never will.”

He smiled. “Then I put her in charge of the man closest to me, George McCloud, and the woman she thinks the most of in the world—except her mother. What is this, are they back? Yonder they come.”

“We found nothing serious,” McCloud said, ​answering their questions as he approached with Lance Dunning. “The current is really swinging away, but the bank is caving in where it was undermined last night.” He stopped before Dicksie. “I am trying to get your cousin to go to the house and go to bed. I am going to stay all night, but there is no necessity for his staying.”

“Damn it, McCloud, it’s not right,” protested Lance, taking off his hat and wiping his forehead. “You need the sleep more than I do. I say he is the one to go to bed to-night,” continued Lance, putting it up to Whispering Smith. “And I insist, by the Almighty, that you two take him back to the house with you now!”

Whispering Smith raised his hand. “If this is merely a family quarrel about who shall go to bed, let us compromise. You two stay up all night and let me go to bed.”

Lance, however, was obdurate.

“It seems to be a family characteristic of the Dunnings to have their own way,” ventured McCloud, after some further dispute. “If you will have it so, Mr. Dunning, you may stand watch to-night and I will go to the house.”

Riding back with McCloud, Dicksie and Whispering Smith discussed the flood. McCloud disclaimed credit for the improvement in the situation. “If the current had held against us as it did ​yesterday, nothing I could have done would have turned it,” he said.

“Honesty is the best policy, of course,” observed Whispering Smith. “I like to see a modest man—and you want to remind him of all this when he sends in his bill,” he suggested, speaking to Dicksie in the dark. “But,” he added, turning to McCloud, “admitting that you are right, don’t take the trouble to advertise your view of it around here. It would be only decent strategy for us in the valley just now to take a little of the credit due to the wind.”

CHAPTER XXV
THE MAN ON THE FRENCHMAN

SINCLAIR'S place on the Frenchman backed up on a sharp rise against the foothills of the Bridger range, and the ranch buildings were strung along the creek. The ranch-house stood on ground high enough to command the country for miles up and down the valley.

Only two roads lead from Medicine Bend and the south into the Frenchman country: one a wagon-road following Smoky Creek and running through Dale Canyon; the other a pack-road, known as the Gridley trail, crossing the Topah Topah Hills and making a short cut from the Dunning ranch on the Crawling Stone to the Frenchman. The entire valley is, in fact, so difficult of access, save by the long and roundabout wagon-road, that the sight of a complete outfit of buildings such as that put up by Sinclair always came as a surprise to the traveller who, reaching the crest of the hills, looked suddenly down a thousand feet on his well-ordered sheds and barns and corrals.

The rider who reaches the Topah Topah crest ​on the Gridley trail now sees in the valley below only traces of what was so laboriously planned and perfectly maintained a few years ago. But even the ruins left on the Frenchman show the herculean labor undertaken by the man in setting up a comfortable and even an elaborate establishment in so inaccessible a spot. His defiance of all ordinary means of doing things was shown in his preference for bringing much of his building-material over the trail instead of around by the Smoky Creek road. A good part of the lumber that went into his house was packed over the Gridley trail. His piano was brought through the canyon on a wagon, but the mechanical player for the piano and his wagons themselves were packed over the trail on the backs of mules. A heavy steel range for the kitchen had been brought over the same way. For Sinclair no work was hard enough, none went fast enough, and revelry never rose high enough. During the time of his activity in the Frenchman Valley Sinclair had the best-appointed place between Williams Cache and the Crawling Stone, and in the Crawling Stone only the Dunning ranch would bear comparison with his own. On the Frenchman Sinclair kept an establishment the fame of which is still foremost in mountain story. Here his cows ranged the canyons and the hills for miles, and his horses were known from ​Medicine Bend to Fort Tracy. Here he rallied his men, laid snares for his enemies, dispensed a reckless hospitality, ruled his men with an oath and a blow, and carried a six-shooter to explain orders and answer questions with.

Over the Gridley trail from the Crawling Stone Marion and Dicksie Dunning rode early in the morning the day after McCloud and his men left the Stone Ranch with their work done. The trail is a good three hours long, and they reached Sinclair’s place at about ten o’clock. He was waiting for Marion—she had sent word she should come—and he came out of the front door into the sunshine with a smile of welcome when he saw Dicksie with her. Dicksie, long an admirer of Sinclair’s, as women usually were, had recast somewhat violently her opinions of him. She faced him now with a criminal consciousness that she knew too much. The weight of the dreadful secret weighed on her, and her responsibility in the issue of the day ahead did not help to make her greeting an easy one. One thing only was fixed in her mind and reflected in the tension of her lips and her eyes: the resolve to keep at every cost the promise she had given. For Dicksie had fallen under the spell of a man even more compelling than Sinclair, and felt strangely bounden to what she had said.

​Sinclair, however, had spirit enough to smooth quite away every embarrassment. “Bachelor’s quarters,” he explained roughly and pleasantly, as he led the two women toward the house. “Cowmen make poor housekeepers, but you must feel at home.” And when Dicksie, looking at his Indian rugs on the floors, the walls, and the couches, said she thought he had little to apologize for, Sinclair looked gratified and took off his hat again. “Just a moment,” he said, standing at the side of the door. “I’ve never been able to get Marion over here before, so it happens that a woman’s foot has never entered the new house. I want to watch one of you cross the threshold for the first time.”

Dicksie, moving ahead, retreated with a laugh. “You first, then, Marion.”

“No, Dicksie, you.”

“Never! you first.” So Marion, quite red and wretchedly ill at ease, walked into the ranch-house first.

Sinclair shone nowhere better than as a host. When he had placed his guests comfortably in the living-room he told them the story of the building of the house. Then he made a cicerone of himself, and explained, with running comments, each feature of his plan as he showed how it had been carried out through the various rooms. Surprised at the attractiveness of things, Dicksie found ​herself making mental notes for her own use, and began asking questions. Sinclair was superb in answering, but the danger of admiring things became at once apparent, for when Dicksie exclaimed over a handsome bearskin, a rich dark brown grizzly-skin of unusual size, Sinclair told the story of the killing, bared his tremendous forearm to show where the polished claws had ripped him, and, disregarding Dicksie’s protests, insisted on sending the skin over to Crawling Stone Ranch as a souvenir of her visit.

“I live a great deal alone over here,” he said, waving Dicksie’s continued refusal magnificently aside as he moved into the next room. “I’ve got a few good dogs, and I hunt just enough to keep my hand in with a rifle.” Dicksie quailed a little at the smile that went with the words. “The men, at least the kind I mix with, don’t care for grizzly-skins, and to enjoy anything you’ve got to have sympathetic company—don’t you know that?” he asked, looking admiringly at Dicksie. “I’ve got another skin for you—a silver-tip,” he added in deep, gentle tones, addressing Marion. “It has a fine head, as fine as I ever saw in the Smithsonian. It is down at Medicine Bend now, being dressed and mounted. By the way, I’ve forgotten to ask you, Miss Dicksie, about the high water. How did you get through at the ranch?”

​Dicksie, sitting on the piano-bench, looked up with resolution. “Bravely!” she exclaimed. “Mr. McCloud came to our rescue with bags and mattresses and a hundred men, and he has put in a revetement a thousand feet long. Oh, we are regular river experts at our house now! Had you any trouble here, Mr. Sinclair?”

“No, the Frenchman behaves pretty well in the rock. We had forty feet of water here one day, though; forty feet, that’s right. McCloud, yes; able fellow, I guess, too, though he and I don’t hit it off.” Sinclair sat back in his chair, and as he spoke he spoke magnanimously. “He doesn’t like me, but that is no fault of his; railroad men, and good ones, too, sometimes get started wrong with one another. Well, I’m glad he took care of you. Try that piano, Miss Dicksie, will you? I don’t know much about pianos, but that ought to be a good one. I would wheel the player over for you, but any one that plays as beautifully as you do ought not to be allowed to use a player. Marion, I want to talk a few minutes with you, may I? Do you mind going out under the cottonwood?”

Dicksie’s heart jumped. “Don’t be gone long, Marion,” she exclaimed impulsively, “for you know, Mr. Sinclair, we must get back by two o’clock.” And Dicksie, pale with apprehension, ​looked at them both. Marion, quite composed, nodded reassuringly and followed Sinclair out of doors into the sunshine.

For a few minutes Dicksie fingered wildly on the piano at some half-forgotten air, and in a fever of excitement walked out on the porch to see where they were. To her relief, she saw Marion sitting near Sinclair under the big tree in front of the house, where the horses stood. Dicksie, with her hands on her girdle, walked forlornly back and forth, hummed a tune, sat down in a rocking-chair, fanned herself, rose, walked back and forth again, and reflected that she was perfectly helpless, and that Sinclair might kill Marion a hundred times before she could reach her. And the thought that Marion was perhaps wholly unconscious of danger increased her anxiety.

She sat down in despair. How could Whispering Smith have allowed any one he had a care for to be exposed in this dreadful way? Trying to think what to do, Dicksie hurried back into the living-room, walked to the piano, took the pile of sheet-music from the top, and sat down to thumb it over. She threw song after song on the chair beside her. They were sheets of gaudy coon songs and ragtime with flaring covers, and they seemed to give off odors of cheap perfume. Dicksie hardly saw the titles as she passed them over, but of a ​sudden she stopped. Between two sheets of the music lay a small handkerchief. It was mussed, and in the corner of it “Nellie” was written conspicuously in a laundry mark. The odor of musk became in an instant sickening. Dicksie threw the music disdainfully aside, and sprang up with a flushed face to leave the room. Sinclair’s remark about the first woman to cross his threshold came back to her. From that moment Dicksie hated him. But no sooner had she seated herself on the porch than she remembered she had left her hat in the house, and rose to go in after it. She was resolved not to leave it under the roof another moment, and she had resolved to go over and wait where her horse was tied. As she reëntered the doorway she stopped. In the room she had just left a cowboy sat at the table, taking apart a revolver to clean it. The revolver was spread in its parts before him, but across the table lay a rifle. The man had not been in the room when she left it a moment before.

Dicksie passed behind him. He paid no attention to her; he had not looked up when she entered the room. Passing behind him once more to go out, Dicksie looked through the open window before which he sat. Sinclair and Marion sitting under the cottonwood tree were in plain sight, and the muzzle of the rifle where it lay covered them. ​Dicksie thrilled, but the man was busy with his work. Breathing deeply, she walked out on the porch again. Sinclair, she thought, was looking straight at her, and in her anxiety to appear unconscious she turned, walked to the end of the house, and at the corner almost ran into a man sitting out of doors in the shade mending a saddle. He had removed his belt to work, and his revolver lay in the holster on the bench, its grip just within reach of his hand. Dicksie walked in front of him, but he did not look up. She turned as if changing her mind, and with a little flirt of her riding-skirt sat down in the porch chair, feeling a faint moisture upon her forehead.

“I am going to leave this country, Marion,” Sinclair was saying. “There’s nothing here for me; I can see that. What’s the use of my eating my heart out over the way I’ve been treated? I’ve given the best years of my life to this railroad, and now they turn me down with a kick and a curse. It’s the old story of the Indian and his dog, only I don’t propose to let them make soup of me. I’m going to the coast, Marion. I’m going to California, where I wanted to go when we were married, and I wish to God we had gone there then. All our troubles might never have been if I had got in with a different crowd from ​these cow-boozers on the start. And, Marion, I want to know whether you’ll give me another chance and go with me.”

Sinclair, on the bench and leaning against the tree, sat with folded arms looking at his wife. Marion in a hickory chair faced him.

“No one would like to see you be all you ought to be more than I, Murray; but you are the only one in the world that can ever give yourself another chance to be that.”

“The fellows in the saddle here now have denied me every chance to make a man of myself again on the railroad—you know that, Marion. In fact, they never did give me the show I was entitled to. I ought to have had Hailey’s place. Bucks never treated me right in that; he never pushed me in the way he pushed other men that were just as bad as I ever was. It discouraged me; that’s the reason I went to pieces.”

“It could be no reason for treating me as you treated me: for bringing drunken men and drunken women into our house, and driving me out of it unless I would be what you were and what they were.”

“I know I haven’t treated you right; I’ve treated you shamefully. I will do anything on earth you say to square it. I will! Recollect, I had lived among men and in the same country ​with women like that for years before I knew you. I didn’t know how to treat you; I admit it. Give me another chance, Marion.”

“I gave you all that I had when I married you, Murray. I haven’t anything more to give to any man. You would be disappointed in me if I could ever live with you again, and I could not do that without living a lie every day.”

He bent forward, looking at the ground. He talked of their first meeting in Wisconsin; of the happiness of their little courtship; he brought up California again, and the Northwest coast, where, he told her, a great railroad was to be built and he should find the chance he needed to make a record for himself—it had been promised him—a chance to be the man his abilities entitled him to be in railroading. “And I’ve got a customer for the ranch and the cows, Marion. I don’t care for this business—damn the cows! let somebody else chase after ’em through the sleet. I’ve done well; I’ve made money—a lot of money—the last two years in my cattle deals, and I’ve got it put away, Marion; you need never lift your hand to work in our house again. We can live in California, and live well, under our own orange trees, whether I work or not. All I want to know is, will you go with me?”

“No! I will not go with you, Murray.”

​He moved in his seat and threw his head up appealingly. “Why not?”

“I will never be dishonest with you; I never have been and I never will be. I have nothing in my heart to give you, and I will not live upon your money. I am earning my own living. I am as content as I ever can be, and I shall stay where I am and do what I am doing till I die, probably. And this is why I came when you asked me to; to tell you the exact truth. I am not a girl any longer—I never can be again. I am a woman. What I was before I married you I never can be again, and you have no right to ask me to be a hypocrite and say I can love you—for that is what it all comes to—when I have no such thing in my heart or life for you. It is dead and gone, and I cannot help it.”

“That sounds pretty hard, Marion.”

“It is only the truth. It sounded fearfully hard to me when you told me that woman was your friend—that you knew her before you knew me and would know her after I was dead; that she was as good as I, and that if I didn’t entertain her you would. But it was the truth; you told me the truth, and it was better that you told it—as it is better now that I tell it to you.”

“I was drunk. I didn’t tell you the truth. A man is a pretty tough animal sometimes, but you ​are a woman and a pure one, and I care more for you than for all the other women in the world, and it is not your nature to be unforgiving.”

“It is to be honest.”

He looked suddenly up at her and spoke sharply: “Marion, I know why you won’t go.”

“I have honestly told you.”

“No; you have not honestly told me. The real reason is Gordon Smith.”

“If he were I should not hesitate to tell you, Murray, but he is not,” she said coldly.

Sinclair spoke harshly: “Do you think you can fool me? Don’t you suppose I know he spends his time loafing around your shop?”

Marion flushed indignantly. “It is not true!”

“Don’t you suppose I know he writes letters back to Wisconsin to your folks?”

“What have I to do with that? Why shouldn’t he write to my mother? Who has a better right?”

“Don’t drive me too far. By God! if I go away alone I’ll never leave you here to run off with Whispering Smith—remember that!” She sat in silence. His rage left her perfectly quiet, and her unmoved expression shamed and in part silenced him. “Don’t drive me too far,” he muttered sullenly. “If you do you will be responsible, Marion.”

She did not move her eyes from the blue hills ​on the horizon. “I expect you to kill me sometime; I feel sure you will. And that you may do.” Then she bent her look on him. “You may do it now if you want to.”

His face turned heavy with rage. “Marion,” he cried, with an oath, “do you know how close you are to death at this moment?”

“You may do it now.”

He clinched the bench-rail and rose slowly to his feet. Marion sat motionless in the hickory chair; the sun was shining in her face and her hands were folded in her lap. Dicksie rocked on the porch. In the shadow of the house the man was mending the saddle.

CHAPTER XXVI
TOWER W

AT the end of a long and neglected hall on the second floor of the old bank block in Hill Street, Whispering Smith had a room in which he made headquarters at Medicine Bend; it was in effect Whispering Smith’s home. A man’s room is usually a forlorn affair in spite of any effort to make it home-like. If he neglects his room it looks barren, and if he ornaments it it looks fussy. Boys can do something with a den because they are not yet men, and some tincture of woman’s nature still clings to a boy. Girls are born to the deftness that is to become all theirs in the touch of a woman’s hand; but men, if they walk alone, pay the penalty of loneliness.

Whispering Smith, being logical, made no effort to decorate his domestic poverty. All his belongings were of a simple sort and his room was as bare as a Jesuit’s. Moreover, his affairs, being at times highly particular, did not admit of the presence of a janitor in his quarters, and he was of necessity his own janitor. His iron bed was spread ​with a pair of Pullman blankets, his toilet arrangements included nothing more elaborate than a shaving outfit, and the mirror above his washstand was only large enough to make a hurried shave, with much neck-stretching, possible. The table was littered with letters, but it filled up one corner of the room, and a rocking-chair and a trunk filled up another. The floor was spread with a Navajo blanket, and near the head of the bed stood an old-fashioned wardrobe. This served not to ward Whispering Smith’s robes, which hung for the most part on his back, but to accommodate his rifles, of which it contained an array that only a practised man could understand. The wardrobe was more, however, than an armory. Beside the guns that stood racked in precision along the inner wall, McCloud had once, to his surprise, seen a violin. It appeared out of keeping in such an atmosphere and rather the antithesis of force and violence than a complement for it. And again, though the rifles were disquietingly bright and effective-looking, the violin was old and shabby, hanging obscurely in its corner, as if, whatever it might have in common with its master, it had nothing in common with its surroundings.

The door of the room in the course of many years had been mutilated with keyholes and reënforced with locks until it appeared difficult to ​choose an opening that would really afford entrance; but two men besides Whispering Smith carried keys to the room—Kennedy and George McCloud. They had right of way into it at all hours, and knew how to get in.

McCloud had left the bridge camp on the river for Medicine Bend on the Saturday that Marion Sinclair—whose husband had finally told her he would give her one more chance to think it over—returned with Dicksie safely from their trip to the Frenchman ranch.

Whispering Smith, who had been with Bucks and Morris Blood, got back to town the same day. The president and general manager were at the Wickiup during the afternoon, and left for the East at nine o’clock in the evening, when their car was attached to an east-bound passenger train. McCloud took supper afterward with Whispering Smith at a Front Street chop-house, and the two men separated at eleven o’clock. It was three hours later when McCloud tapped on the door of Smith’s room, and in a moment opened it. “Awake, Gordon?”

“Sure: come in. What is it?”

“The second section of the passenger train—Number Three, with the express cars—was stopped at Tower W to-night. Oliver Sollers was pulling; he is badly shot up, and one of the messengers was ​shot all to pieces. They cracked the through safe, emptied it, and made a clean get-away.”

“Tower W—two hundred and seventy-six miles. Have you ordered up an engine?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s Kennedy?”

A second voice answered: “Right here.”

“Strike a light, Farrell. What about the horses?”

“They’re being loaded.”

“Is the line clear?”

“Rooney Lee is clearing it.”

“Spike it, George, and leave every westbound train in siding, with the engine cut loose and plenty of steam, till we get by. It’s now or never this time. Two hundred and seventy-six miles; they’re giving us our money’s worth. Who’s going with us, Farrell?”

“Bob Scott, Reed Young, and Brill, if Reed can get him at Sleepy Cat. Dancing is loading the horses.”

“I want Ed Banks to lead a posse straight from here for Williams Cache; Dancing can go with him. And telephone Gene and Bob Johnson to sit down in Canadian Pass till they grow to the rocks, but not to let anybody through if they want to live after I see them. They’ve got all the instructions; all they need is the word. It’s a long chance, ​but I think these are our friends. You can head Banks off by telephone somewhere if we change our minds when we get a trail. Start Brill Young and a good man from Sleepy Cat ahead of us, George, if you can, in a baggage car with any horses that they can get there. They can be at Tower W by daybreak and perhaps pick up a trail before we reach there, and we shall have fresh horses for them. I’m ready, I guess; let’s go. Slam the door, George!” In the hall Whispering Smith threw a pocket-light on his watch. “I want you to put us there by seven o’clock.”

“Charlie Sollers is going to pull you,” answered McCloud. “Have you got everything? Then we’re off.” The three men tiptoed down the dark hall, down the stairs, and across the street on a noiseless run for the railroad yard.

The air was chill and the sky clear, with a moon more than half to the full. “Lord, what a night to ride!” exclaimed Whispering Smith, looking mournfully at the stars. “Well planned, well planned, I must admit.”

The men hastened toward the yard, where lanterns were moving about the car of the train-guards near the Blue Front stables. The loading board had been lowered, and the horses were being carefully led into the car. From a switch engine behind the car a shrill cloud of steam ​billowed into the air. Across the yard a great passenger engine, its huge white side-rod rising and falling slowly in the still light of the moon—one of the mountain racers, thick-necked like an athlete and deep-chested—was backing down for the run with the single car almost across the west end of the division. Trainmen were running to and from the Wickiup platform. By the time the horses were loaded the conductor had orders. Until the last minute, Whispering Smith was in consultation with McCloud, and giving Dancing precise instructions for the posse into the Cache country. They were still talking at the side door of the car, McCloud and Dancing on the ground and Whispering Smith squatting on his haunches inside the moving car, when the engine signalled and the special drew away from the chute, pounded up the long run of the ladder switch, and moved with gathering speed into the canyon. In the cab Charlie Sollers, crushing in his hand the tissue that had brought the news of his brother’s death, sat at the throttle. He had no speed orders. They had only told him he had a clear track.

CHAPTER XXVII
PURSUIT

BRILL YOUNG picked up a trail Sunday morning at Tower W before the special from Medicine Bend reached there. The wrecked express car, which had been set out, had no story to tell. “The only story,” said Whispering Smith, as the men climbed into their saddles, “is in the one from the hoofs, and the sooner we get after it the better.”

The country around Tower W, which is itself an operating point on the western end of the division, a mere speck on the desert, lies high and rolling. To the south, sixty miles away, rise the Grosse Terre Mountains, and to the north and west lie the solitudes of the Heart range, while in the northeast are seen the three white Saddle peaks of the Missions. The cool, bright sunshine of a far and lonely horizon greets the traveller here, and ten miles away from the railroad, in any direction, a man on horseback and unacquainted with the country would wish himself—mountain men ​will tell you—in hell, because it would be easier to ride out of.

To the railroad men the country offered no unusual difficulties. The Youngs were as much at home on a horse as on a hand car. Kennedy, though a large and powerful man, was inured to hard riding, and Bob Scott and Whispering Smith in the saddle were merely a part—though an important part—of their horses; without killing their mounts, they could get out of them every mile in their legs. The five men covered twenty miles on a trail that read like print. One after another of the railroad party commented on the carelessness with which it had been left. But twenty miles south of the railroad, in an open and comparatively easy country, it was swallowed completely up in the tracks of a hundred horses. The railroad men circled far and wide, only to find the herd tracks everywhere ahead of them.

“This is a beautiful job,” murmured Whispering Smith as the party rode together along the edge of a creek-bottom. “Now who is their friend down in this country? What man would get out a bunch of horses like this and work them this hard so early in the morning? Let’s hunt that man up. I like to meet a man that is a friend in need.”

Bob Scott spoke: “I saw a man with some ​horses in a canyon across the creek a few minutes ago, and I saw a ranch-house behind those buttes when I rode around them.”

“Stop! Here’s a man riding right into our jaws,” muttered Kennedy. “Divide up among the rocks.” A horseman from the south came galloping up the creek, and Kennedy rode out with an ivory smile to meet him. The two men parleyed for a moment, disputed each other sharply, and rode together back to the railroad party.

“Haven’t seen any men looking for horses this morning, have you?” asked Whispering Smith, eying the stranger, a squat, square-jawed fellow with a cataract eye.

“I’m looking for horses myself. I ain’t seen anybody else. What are you looking for?”

“Is this your bunch of horses that got loose here?” asked Smith.

“No.”

“I thought,” said Kennedy, smiling, “you said a minute ago they were.”

The stranger fixed his cataract on him like a flash-light. “I changed my mind.”

Whispering Smith’s brows rose protestingly, but he spoke with perfect amiability as he raised his finger to bring the good eye his way. “You ought to change your hat when you change your mind. I saw you driving a bunch of horses up that canyon ​a few minutes ago. Now, Rockstro, do you still drag your left leg?”

The rancher looked steadily at his new inquisitor, but blinked like a gopher at the sudden onslaught. “Which of you fellows is Whispering Smith?” he demanded.

“The man with the dough is Whispering Smith every time,” was the answer from Smith himself. “You have about seven years to serve, Rockstro, haven’t you? Seven, I think. Now what have I ever done to you that you should turn a trick like this on me? I knew you were here, and you knew I knew you were here, and I call this a pretty country; a little smooth right around here, like the people, but pretty. Have I ever bothered you? Now tell me one thing—what did you get for covering this trail? I stand to give you two dollars for every one you got last night for the job, if you’ll put us right on the game. Which way did they go?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Get off your horse a minute,” suggested Whispering Smith, dismounting, “and step over here toward the creek.” The man, afraid to refuse and unwilling to go, walked haltingly after Smith.

“What is it, Rockstro?” asked his tormentor. “Don’t you like this country? What do you want to go back to the penitentiary for? Aren’t you ​happy here? Now tell me one thing—will you give up the trail?”

“I don’t know the trail.”

“I believe you; we shouldn’t follow it anyway. Were you paid last night or this morning?”

“I ain’t seen a man hereabouts for a week.”

“Then you can’t tell me whether there were five men or six?”

“You’ve got one eye as good as mine, and one a whole lot better.”

“So it was fixed up for cash a week ago?”

“Everything is cash in this country.”

“Well, Rockstro, I’m sorry, but we’ll have to take you back with us.”

The rancher whipped out a revolver. Whispering Smith caught his wrist. The struggle lasted only an instant. Rockstro writhed, and the pistol fell to the ground.

“Now, shall I break your arm?” asked Smith, as the man cursed and resisted. “Or will you behave? We are going right back and you’ll have to come with us. We’ll send some one down to round up your horses and sell them, and you can serve out your time—with allowances, of course, for good conduct, which will cut it down. If I had ever done you a mean turn I would not say a word. If you could name a friend of yours I had ever done a mean turn to I would not say a word. ​Can you name one? I guess not. I have left you as free as the wind here, making only the rule I make for everybody—to let the railroad alone. This is my thanks. Now, I’ll ask you just one question. I haven’t killed you, as I had a perfect right to when you pulled; I haven’t broken your arm, as I would have done if there had been a doctor within twenty-five miles; and I haven’t started you for the pen—not yet. Now I ask you one fair question only: Did you need the money?”

“Yes, I did need it.”

Whispering Smith dropped the man’s wrist. “Then I don’t say a word. If you needed the money, I’m not going to send you back—not for mine.”

“How can a man make a living in this country,” asked the rancher, with a bitter oath, “unless he picks up everything that’s going?”

“Pick up your gun, man! I’m not saying anything, am I?”

“But I’m damned if I can give a double-cross to any man,” added Rockstro, stooping for his revolver.

“I should think less of you, Rockstro, if you did. You don’t need money anyway now, but sometime you may need a friend. I’m going to leave you here. You’ll hear no more of this, and I’m going to ask you a question: Why did you go ​against this when you knew you’d have to square yourself with me?”

“They told me you’d be taken care of before it was pulled off.”

“They lied to you, didn’t they? No matter, you’ve got their stuff. Now I am going to ask you one question that I don’t know the answer to; it’s a fair question, too. Was Du Sang in the penitentiary with you at Fort City? Answer fair.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. Behave yourself and keep your mouth shut. I say nothing this time. Hereafter leave railroad matters alone, and if the woman should fall sick or you have to have a little money, come and see me.” Smith led the way back to the horses.

“Look here!” muttered Rockstro, following, with his good eye glued on his companion. “I pulled on you too quick, I guess—quicker’n I’d ought to.”

“Don’t mention it. You didn’t pull quick enough; it is humiliating to have a man that’s as slow as you are pull on me. People that pull on me usually pull and shoot at the same time. Two distinct movements, Rockstro, should be avoided; they are fatal to success. Come down to the Bend sometime, and I’ll get you a decent gun and give you a few lessons.”

​Whispering Smith drew his handkerchief as the one-eyed man rode away and he rejoined his companions. He was resigned, after a sickly fashion. “I like to play blind-man’s-buff,” he said, wiping his forehead, “but not so far from good water. They have pulled us half-way to the Grosse Terre Mountains on a beautiful trail, too beautiful to be true, Farrell—too beautiful to be true. They have been having fun with us, and they’ve doubled back, through the Topah Topahs toward the Mission Mountains and Williams Cache—that is my judgment. And aren’t we five able-bodied jays, gentlemen? Five strong-arm suckers? It is an inelegant word; it is an inelegant feeling. No matter, we know a few things. There are five good men and a led horse; we can get out of here by Goose River, find out when we cross the railroad how much they got, and pick them up somewhere around the Saddle peaks, if they’ve gone north. That’s only a guess, and every man’s guess is good now. What do you think, all of you?”

“If it’s the crowd we think it is, would they go straight home? That doesn’t look reasonable, does it?” asked Brill Young.

“If they could put one day between them and pursuit, wouldn’t they be safer at home than anywhere else? And haven’t they laid out one day’s work for us, good and plenty? Farrell, remember ​one thing: there is sometimes a disadvantage in knowing too much about the men you are after. We’ll try Goose River.”

It was noon when they struck the railroad. They halted long enough to stop a freight train, send some telegrams, and ask for news. They got orders from Rooney Lee, had an empty box car set behind the engine for a special, and, loading their horses at the chute, made a helter-skelter run for Sleepy Cat. At three o’clock they struck north for the Mission Mountains.

CHAPTER XXVIII
THE SUNDAY MURDER

BANKS'S posse, leaving Medicine Bend before daybreak, headed northwest. Their instructions were explicit: to scatter after crossing the Frenchman, watch the trails from the Goose River country and through the Mission Mountains, and intercept everybody riding north until the posse from Sleepy Cat or Whispering Smith should communicate with them from the southwest. Nine men rode in the party that crossed the Crawling Stone Sunday morning at sunrise with Ed Banks.

After leaving the river the three white-capped Saddles of the Mission range afford a landmark for more than a hundred miles, and toward these the party pressed steadily all day. The southern pass of the Missions opens on the north slope of the range into a pretty valley known as Mission Springs Valley, and the springs are the head-waters of Deep Creek. The posse did not quite obey the instructions, and following a natural instinct of safety five of them, after Banks and his three ​deputies had scattered, bunched again, and at dark crossed Deep Creek at some distance below the springs. It was afterward known that these five men had been seen entering the valley from the east at sundown just as four of the men they wanted rode down South Mission Pass toward the springs. That they knew they would soon be cut off, or must cut their way through the line which Ed Banks, ahead of them, was posting at every gateway to Williams Cache, was probably clear to them. Four men rode that evening from Tower W through the south pass; the fifth man had already left the party. The four men were headed for Williams Cache and had reason to believe, until they sighted Banks’s men, that their path was open.

They halted to take counsel on the suspicious-looking posse far below them, and while their cruelly exhausted horses rested, Du Sang, always in Sinclair’s absence the brains of the gang, planned the escape over Deep Creek at Baggs’s crossing. At dusk they divided: two men lurking in the brush along the creek rode as close as they could, unobserved, toward the crossing, while Du Sang and the cowboy Karg, known as Flat Nose, rode down to Baggs’s ranch at the foot of the pass.

At that point Dan Baggs, an old locomotive engineer, had taken a homestead, got together a ​little bunch of cattle, and was living alone with his son, a boy of ten years. It was a hard country and too close to Williams Cache for comfort, but Dan got on with everybody because the toughest man in the Cache country could get a meal, a feed for his horse, and a place to sleep at Baggs’s, without charge, when he needed it.

Ed Banks, by hard riding, got to the crossing at five o’clock, and told Baggs of the hold-up and the shooting of Oliver Sollers. The news stirred the old engineman, and his excitement threw him off his guard. Banks rode straight on for the middle pass, leaving word that two of his men would be along within half an hour to watch the pass and the ranch crossing, and asking Baggs to put up some kind of a fight for the crossing until more of the posse came up—at the least, to make sure that nobody got any fresh horses.

The boy was cooking supper in the kitchen, and Baggs had done his milking and gone back to the corral, when two men rode around the corner of the barn and asked if they could get something to eat. Poor Baggs sold his life in six words: “Why, yes; be you Banks’s men?”

Du Sang answered: “No; we’re from Sheriff Coon’s office at Oroville, looking up a bunch of Duck Bar steers that’s been run somewhere up Deep Creek. Can we stay here all night?”

​They dismounted and disarmed Baggs’s suspicions, though the condition of their horses might have warned him had he had his senses. The unfortunate man had probably fixed it in his mind that a ride from Tower W to Deep Creek in sixteen hours was a physical impossibility.

“Stay here? Sure! I want you to stay,” said Baggs bluffly. “Looks to me like I seen you down at Crawling Stone, ain’t I?” he asked of Karg.

Karg was lighting a cigarette. “I used to mark at the Dunning ranch,” he answered, throwing away his match.

“That’s hit. Good! The boy’s cooking supper. Step up to the kitchen and tell him to cut ham for four more.”

“Four?”

“Two of Ed Banks’s men will be here by six o’clock. Heard about the hold-up? They stopped Number Three at Tower W last night and shot Ollie Sollers, as white a boy as ever pulled a throttle. Boys, a man that’ll kill a locomotive engineer is worse’n an Indian; I’d help skin him.”

“The hell you would!” cried Du Sang. “Well, don’t you want to start in on me? I killed Sollers. Look at me; ain’t I handsome? What you going to do about it?”

Before Baggs could think Du Sang was shooting ​him down. It was wanton. Du Sang stood in no need of the butchery; the escape could have been made without it. His victim had pulled an engine throttle too long to show the white feather, but he was dying by the time he had dragged a revolver from his pocket. Du Sang did the killing alone. At least, Flat Nose, who alone saw all of the murder, afterward maintained that he did not draw because he had no occasion to, and that Baggs was dead before he, Karg, had finished his cigarette. With his right arm broken and two bullets through his chest, Baggs fell on his face. That, however, did not check his murderer. Rising to his knees, Baggs begged for his life. “For God’s sake! I’m helpless, gentlemen! I’m helpless. Don’t kill me like a dog!” But Du Sang, emptying his pistol, threw his rifle to his shoulder and sent bullet after bullet crashing through the shapeless form writhing and twitching before him until he had beaten it in the dust soft and flat and still.

Banks’s men came up within an hour to find the ranch-house deserted. They saw a lantern in the yard below, and near the corral gate they found the little boy in the darkness, screaming beside his father’s body. The sheriff’s men carried the old engineman to the house; others of the posse crossed the creek during the evening, and at eleven o’clock ​Whispering Smith rode down from the south pass to find that four of the men they were after had taken fresh horses, after killing Baggs, and passed safely through the cordon Banks had drawn around the pass and along Deep Creek. Bill Dancing, who had ridden with Banks’s men, was at the house when Whispering Smith arrived. He found some supper in the kitchen, and the tired man and the giant ate together.

Whispering Smith was too experienced a campaigner to complain. His party had struck a trail fifty miles north of Sleepy Cat and followed it to the Missions. He knew now who he was after, and knew that they were bottled up in the Cache for the night. The sheriff’s men were sleeping on the floor of the living-room when Smith came in from the kitchen. He sat down before the fire. At intervals sobs came from the bedroom where the body lay, and after listening a moment, Whispering Smith got stiffly up, and, tiptoeing to still the jingle of his spurs, took the candle from the table, pushed aside the curtain, and entered the bedroom.

The little boy was lying on his face, with his arm around his father’s neck, talking to him. Whispering Smith bent a moment over the bed, and, setting the candle on the table, put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. He disengaged the hand ​from the cold neck, and sitting down took it in his own. Talking low to the little fellow, he got his attention after much patient effort and got him to speak. He made him, though struggling with terror, to understand that he had come to be his friend, and after the child had sobbed his grief into a strange heart he ceased to tremble, and told his name and his story, and described the two horsemen and the horses they had left. Smith listened quietly. “Have you had any supper, Dannie? No? You must have something to eat. Can’t you eat anything? But there is a nice pan of fresh milk in the kitchen.”

A burst of tears interrupted him. “Daddie just brought in the milk, and I was frying the ham, and I heard them shooting.”

“See how he took care of you till the last minute, and left something for you after he was gone. Suppose he could speak now, don’t you think he would want you to do as I say? I am your next friend now, for you are going to be a railroad man and have a big engine.”

Dannie looked up. “Dad wasn’t afraid of those men.”

“Wasn’t he, Dannie?”

“He said we would be all right and not to be afraid.”

“Did he?”

​“He said Whispering Smith was coming.”

“My poor boy.”

“He is coming, don’t be afraid. Do you know Whispering Smith? He is coming. The men to-night all said he was coming.”

The little fellow for a long time could not be coaxed away from his father, but his companion at length got him to the kitchen. When they came back to the bedroom the strange man was talking to him once more about his father. “We must try to think how he would like things done now, mustn’t we? All of us felt so bad when we rode in and had so much to do we couldn’t attend to taking care of your father. Did you know there are two men out at the crossing now, guarding it with rifles? But if you and I keep real quiet we can do something for him while the men are asleep; they have to ride all day to-morrow. We must wash his face and hands, don’t you think so? And brush his hair and his beard. If you could just find the basin and some water and a towel—you couldn’t find a brush, could you? Could you, honestly? Well! I call that a good boy—we shall have to have you on the railroad, sure. We must try to find some fresh clothes—these are cut and stained; then I will change his clothes, and we shall all feel better. Don’t disturb the men; they are tired.”

​They worked together by the candle-light. When they had done, the boy had a violent crying spell, but Whispering Smith got him to lie down beside him on a blanket spread on the floor, where Smith got his back against the sod wall and took the boy’s head in his arm. He waited patiently for the boy to go to sleep, but Dan was afraid the murderers would come back. Once he lifted his head in a confidence. “Did you know my daddy used to run an engine?”

“No, I did not; but in the morning you must tell me all about it.”

Whenever there was a noise in the next room the child roused. After some time a new voice was heard; Kennedy had come and was asking questions. “Wake up here, somebody! Where is Whispering Smith?”

Dancing answered: “He’s right there in the bedroom, Farrell, staying with the boy.”

There was some stirring. Kennedy talked a little and at length stretched himself on the floor. When all was still again, Dannie’s hand crept slowly from the breast of his companion up to his chin, and the little hand, feeling softly every feature, stole over the strange face.

“What is it, Dannie?”

“Are you Whispering Smith?”

“Yes, Dannie. Shut your eyes.”

​At three o’clock, when Kennedy lighted a candle and looked in, Smith was sitting with his back against the wall. The boy lay on his arm. Both were fast asleep. On the bed the dead man lay with a handkerchief over his face.

CHAPTER XXIX
WILLIAMS CACHE

ED BANKS had been recalled before daybreak from the middle pass. Two of the men wanted were now known to have crossed the creek, which meant they must work out of the country through Williams Cache.

“If you will take your best two men, Ed,” said Whispering Smith, sitting down with Banks at breakfast, “and strike straight for Canadian Pass to help Gene and Bob Johnson, I’ll undertake to ride in and talk to Rebstock while Kennedy and Bob Scott watch Deep Creek. The boy gives a good description, and the two men that did the job here are Du Sang and Flat Nose. Did I tell you how we picked up the trail yesterday? Magpies. They shot a scrub horse that gave out on them and skinned the brand. It hastened the banquet, but we got there before the birds were all seated. Great luck, wasn’t it? And it gave us a beautiful trail. One of the party crossed the Goose River at American Fork, and Brill Young and Reed ​followed him. Four came through the Mission Mountains; that is a cinch and they are in the Cache—and if they get out it is our fault personally, Ed, and not the Lord’s.”

Williams Cache lies in the form of a great horn, with a narrow entrance at the lower end known as the Door, and a rock fissure at the upper end leading into Canadian Pass; but this fissure is so narrow that a man with a rifle could withstand a regiment. For a hundred miles east and west rise the granite walls of the Mission range, broken nowhere save by the formation known as the Cache. Even this does not penetrate the range; it is a pocket, and runs not over half-way into it and out again. But no man really knows the Cache; the most that may be said is that the main valley is known, and it is known as the roughest mountain fissure between the Spanish Sinks and the Mantrap country. Williams Cache lies between walls two thousand feet high, and within it is a small labyrinth of canyons. A generation ago, when Medicine Bend for one winter was the terminus of the overland railroad, vigilantes mercilessly cleaned out the town, and the few outlaws that escaped the shotgun and the noose at Medicine Bend found refuge in a far-away and unknown mountain gorge once named by French trappers the Cache. Years after these outcasts had come to infest it came one desperado ​more ferocious than all that had gone before. He made a frontier retreat of the Cache, and left to it the legacy of his evil name, Williams. Since his day it has served, as it served before, for the haunt of outlawed men. No honest man lives in Williams Cache, and few men of any sort live there long, since their lives are lives of violence; neither the law nor a woman crosses Deep Creek. But from the day of Williams to this day the Cache has had its ruler, and when Whispering Smith rode with a little party through the Door into the Cache the morning after the murder in Mission Valley he sent an envoy to Rebstock, whose success as a cattle-thief had brought its inevitable penalty. It had made Rebstock a man of consequence and of property and a man subject to the anxieties and annoyances of such responsibility.

Sitting once in the Three Horses at Medicine Bend, Rebstock had talked with Whispering Smith. “I used to have a good time,” he growled. “When I was rustling a little bunch of steers, just a small bunch all by myself, and hadn’t a cent in the world, no place to sleep and nothing to eat, I had a good time. Now I have to keep my money in the bank; that ain’t pleasant—you know that. Every man that brings a bunch of cattle across Deep Creek has stole ’em, and expects me to buy ’em or lend him money. I’m busy with ​inspectors all the time, deviling with brands, standing off the Stock Association and all kinds of trouble. I’ve got too many cows, too much money. I’m afraid somebody will shoot me if I go to sleep, or poison me if I take a drink. Whispering Smith, I’d like to give you a half-interest in my business. That’s on the square. You’re a young man, and handy; it wouldn’t cost you a cent, and you can have half of the whole shooting-match if you’ll cross Deep Creek and help me run the gang.” Such was Rebstock free from anxiety and in a confidential moment. Under pressure he was, like all men, different.

Whispering Smith had acquaintance even in the Cache, and after a little careful reconnoitring he found a crippled-up thief, driving a milch cow down the Cache, who was willing to take a message to the boss.

Whispering Smith gave his instructions explicitly, facing the messenger, as the two sat in their saddles, with an importunate eye. “Say to Rebstock exactly these words,” he insisted. “This is from Whispering Smith: I want Du Sang. He killed a friend of mine last night at Mission Springs. I happened to be near there and know he rode in last night. He can’t get out; the Canadian is plugged. I won’t stand for the killing, and it is Du Sang or a clean-up in the Cache all ​around, and then I’ll get Du Sang anyway. Regards.”

Riding circumspectly in and about the entrance to the Cache, the party waited an hour for an answer. When the answer came, it was unsatisfactory. Rebstock declined to appear upon so trivial a matter, and Whispering Smith refused to specify a further grievance. More parley and stronger messages were necessary to stir the Deep Creek monarch, but at last he sent word asking Whispering Smith to come to his cabin accompanied only by Kennedy.

The two railroad men rode up the canyon together. “And now I will show you a lean and hungry thief grown monstrous and miserly, Farrell,” said Whispering Smith.

At the head of a short pocket between two sheer granite walls they saw Rebstock’s weather-beaten cabin, and he stood in front of it smoking. He looked moodily at his visitors out of eyes buried between rolls of fat. Whispering Smith was a little harsh as the two shook hands, but he dismounted and followed Rebstock into the house.

“What are you so high and mighty about?” he demanded, throwing his hat on the table near which Rebstock had seated himself. “Why don’t you come out when I send a man to you, or send word what you will do? What have you ​got to kick about? Haven’t you been treated right?”

Being in no position to complain, but shrewdly aware that much unpleasantness was in the wind, Rebstock beat about the bush. He had had rheumatism; he couldn’t ride; he had been in bed three weeks and hadn’t seen Du Sang for three months. “You ain’t chasing up here after Du Sang because he killed a man at Mission Springs. I know better than that. That ain’t the first man he’s killed, and it ain’t a’ goin’ to be the last.”

Whispering Smith lifted his finger and for the first time smiled. “Now there you err, Rebstock—it is ‘a goin’ to be’ the last. So you think I’m after you, do you? Well, if I were, what are you going to do about it? Rebstock, do you think, if I wanted you, I would send a message for you to come out and meet me? Not on your life! When I want you I’ll come to your shack and drag you out by the hair of the head. Sit down!” roared Whispering Smith.

Rebstock, who weighed at least two hundred and seventy-five pounds, had lifted himself up to glare and swear freely. Now he dropped angrily back into his chair. “Well, who do you want?” he bellowed in kind.

A smile softened the asperity of the railroad man’s face. “That’s a fair question and I give ​you a straight answer. I’m not bluffing: I want Du Sang.”

Rebstock squirmed. He swore with shortened breath that he knew nothing about Du Sang; that Du Sang had stolen his cattle; that hanging was too good for him; that he would join any posse in searching for him; and that he had not seen him for three months.

“Likely enough,” assented Whispering Smith, “but this is wasting time. He rode in here last night after killing old Dan Baggs. Your estimable nephew Barney is with him, and Karg is with him, and I want them; but, in especial and particular, I want Du Sang.”

Rebstock denied, protested, wheezed, and stormed, but Whispering Smith was immovable. He would not stir from the Cache upon any promises. Rebstock offered to surrender any one else in the Cache—hinted strongly at two different men for whom handsome rewards were out; but every compromise suggested was met with the same good-natured words: “I want Du Sang.”

At last the smile changed on Whispering Smith’s face. It lighted his eyes still, but with a different expression. “See here, Rebstock, you and I have always got along, haven’t we? I’ve no desire to crowd any man to the wall that is a man. Now I am going to tell you the simple truth. Du Sang ​has got you scared to death. That man is a faker, Rebstock. Because he kills men right and left without any provocation, you think he is dangerous. He isn’t; there are a dozen men in the Cache just as good with a gun as Du Sang is. Don’t shake your head. I know what I’m talking about. He is a jay with a gun, and you may tell him I said so; do you hear? Tell him to come out if he wants me to demonstrate it. He has got everybody, including you, scared to death. Now, I say, don’t be silly. I want Du Sang.”

Rebstock rose to his feet solemnly and pointed his finger at Whispering Smith. “Whispering Smith, you know me—”

“I know you for a fat rascal.”

“That’s all right. You know me, and, just as you say, we always get along because we both got sense.”

“You’re hiding yours to-day, Rebstock.”

“No matter; I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you all the horseflesh you can kill and all the men you can hire to go after him, and I’ll bury your dead myself. You think he can’t shoot? I give you a tip on the square.” Whispering Smith snorted. “He’ll shoot the four buttons off your coat in four shots.” Smith kicked Rebstock’s dog contemptuously. “And do it while you are falling down. I’ve seen him do it,” persisted ​Rebstock, moist with perspiration. “I’m not looking for a chance to go against a sure thing; I wash my hands of the job.”

Whispering Smith rose. “It was no trick to see he had you scared to death. You are losing your wits, old man. The albino is a faker, and I tell you I am going to run him out of the country.” Whispering Smith reached for his hat. “Our treaty ends right here. You promised to harbor no man in your sink that ever went against our road. You know as well as I do that this man, with four others, held up our train night before last at Tower W, shot our engineman to death for mere delight, killed a messenger, took sixty-five thousand dollars out of the through safe, and made his good get-away. Now, don’t lie; you know every word of it, and you thought you could pull it out of me by a bluff. I track him to your door. He is inside the Cache this minute. You know every curve and canyon and pocket and washout in it, and every cut-throat and jail-bird in it, and they pay you blood-money and hush-money every month; and when I ask you not to give up a dozen men the company is entitled to, but merely to send this pink-eyed lobster out with his guns to talk with me, you wash your hands of the job, do you? Now listen. If you don’t send Du Sang into the open before noon to-morrow, I’ll run every ​living steer and every living man out of Williams Cache before I cross the Crawling Stone again, so help me God! And I’ll send for cowboys within thirty minutes to begin the job. I’ll scrape your Deep Creek canyons till the rattlesnakes squeal. I’ll make Williams Cache so wild that a timber-wolf can’t follow his own trail through it. You’ll break with me, will you, Rebstock? Then wind up your bank account; before I finish with you I’ll put you in stripes and feed buzzards off your table.”

Rebstock’s face was apoplectic. He choked with a torrent of oaths. Whispering Smith, paying no attention, walked out to where Kennedy was waiting. He swung into the saddle, ignoring Rebstock’s abjurations, and with Kennedy rode away.

“It is hard to do anything with a man that is scared to death,” said Smith to his companion. “Then, too, Rebstock’s nephew is probably in this. In any case, when Du Sang has got Rebstock scared, he is a dangerous man to be abroad. We have got to smoke him out, Farrell. Lance Dunning insisted the other day he wanted to do me a favor. I’ll see if he’ll lend me Stormy Gorman and some of his cowpunchers for a round-up. We’ve got to smoke Du Sang out. A round-up is the thing. But, by Heaven, if that round-up is ​actually pulled off it will be a classic when you and I are gone.”

Thirty minutes afterward, messengers had taken the Frenchman trail for Lance Dunning’s cowboys.

CHAPTER XXX
THE FIGHT IN THE CACHE

ACLEAR night and a good moon made a long ride possible, and the Crawling Stone contingent, headed by Stormy Gorman, began coming into the railroad camp by three o’clock the next morning. With them rode the two Youngs, who had lost the trail they followed across Goose River and joined the cowboys on the road to the north.

The party divided under Kennedy and Smith, who rode through the Door into the Cache just before daybreak.

“I don’t know what I am steering you against this morning, Farrell,” said Whispering Smith. “Certainly I should hate to run you into Du Sang, but we can’t tell where we shall strike him. If we have laid out the work right I ought to see him as soon as anybody does. Accidents do happen, but remember he will never be any more dangerous than he is at the first moment. Get him to talk. He gets nervous if he can’t shoot right away. When you pull, get a bullet into his ​stomach at the start, if you possibly can, to spoil his aim. We mustn’t make the mistake of underestimating him. Rebstock is right: he is a fright with a revolver, and Sinclair and Seagrue are the only men in the mountains that can handle a rifle with him. Now we split here; and good luck!”

“Don’t you want to take Brill Young with you?”

“You take both the Youngs, Farrell. We shall be among rocks, and if he tries to rush us there is cover.”

Stormy Gorman with four Crawling Stone cowboys followed Whispering Smith. Every rider on the range had a grievance against Williams Cache, and any of them would have been glad to undertake reprisals against the rustlers under the wing of Whispering Smith.

Just how in the mountains—without telegraph, newspapers, and all ordinary means of publicity—news travels so fast may not certainly be said. The scattered lines of telephone wires help, but news outstrips the wires. Moreover, there are no telephones in the Mission Mountains. But on the morning that the round-up party rode into the Cache it was known in the streets of Medicine Bend that the Tower W men had been tracked into the north country; that some, if not all, of them were in Williams Cache; that an ultimatum ​had been given, and that Whispering Smith and Kennedy had already ridden in with their men to make it good.

Whispering Smith, with the cowboys, took the rough country to the left, and Kennedy and his party took the south prong of the Cache Creek. The instructions were to make a clean sweep as the line advanced. Behind the centre rode three men to take stock driven in from the wings. Word that was brief but reasonable had been sent everywhere ahead. Every man, it was promised, that could prove property should have a chance to do so at the Door that day and the next; but any brands that showed stolen cattle, or that had been skinned or tampered with in any way, were to be turned over to the Stock Association for the benefit of owners.

The very first pocket raided started a row and uncovered eighty head of five-year-old steers bearing a mutilated Duck Bar brand. It was like poking at rattlesnakes to undertake to clean out the grassy retreats of the Cache, but the work was pushed on in spite of protests, threats, and resistance. Every man that rode out openly to make a protest was referred calmly to Rebstock, and before very long Rebstock’s cabin had more men around it than had been seen together in the Cache for years. The impression that the whole jig was ​up, and that the refugees had been sold out by their own boss, was one that no railroad man undertook to discourage. The cowboys insisted on the cattle, with the assurance that Rebstock could explain everything. By noon the Cache was in an uproar. The cowboys were riding carefully, and their guards, rifles in hand, were watching the corners. Ahead of the slowly moving line with the growing bunch of cattle behind it, flourished as it were rather conspicuously, fugitive riders dashed back and forth with curses and yells across the narrow valley. If it had been Whispering Smith’s intention to raise a large-sized row it was apparent that he had been successful. Rebstock, driven to desperation, held council after council to determine what to do. Sorties were discussed, ambushes considered, and a pitched battle was planned. But, while ideas were plentiful, no one aspired to lead an attack on Whispering Smith.

Moreover, Williams Cache, it was conceded, would in the end be worsted if the company and the cowmen together seriously undertook with men and unlimited money to clean it out. Whispering Smith’s party had no explanation to offer for the round-up, but when Rebstock made it known that the fight was over sending out Du Sang, the rage of the rustlers turned on Du Sang. Again, however, no man wanted to take up personally with ​Du Sang the question of the reasonableness of Whispering Smith’s demand. Instead of doing so, they fell on Rebstock and demanded that if he were boss he make good and send Du Sang out.

Of all this commotion the railroad men saw only the outward indications. As the excitement grew on both sides there was perhaps a little more of display in the way the cattle were run in, especially when some long-lost bunch was brought to light and welcomed with yells from the centre. A steer was killed at noon, everybody fed, and the line moved forward. The wind, which had slept in the sunshine of the morning, rose in the afternoon, and the dust whirled in little clouds where men or animals moved. From the centre two men had gone back with the cattle gathered up to that time, and Bill Dancing, with Smith, Stormy Gorman, and two of the cowboys, were heading a draw to cross to the north side of the Cache, when three men rode out into the road five hundred yards ahead, and halted.

Whispering Smith spoke: “There come our men; stop here. This ground in front of us looks good to me; they may have chosen something over there that suits them better. Feel your guns and we’ll start forward slowly; don’t take your eyes off the bunch, whatever you do. Bill, you go back ​and help the men with the cattle; there will be four of us against three then.”

“Not for mine!” said Bill Dancing bluntly. “You may need help from an old fool yet. I’ll see you through this and look after the cattle afterward.”

“Then, Stormy, one or two of you go back,” urged Whispering Smith, speaking to the cowboy foreman without turning his eyes. “There’s no need of five of us in this.”

But Stormy swore violently. “You go back yourself,” exclaimed Stormy, when he could control his feelings. “We’ll bring them fellows in for you in ten minutes with their hands in the air.”

“I know you would; I know it. But I’m paid for this sort of thing and you are not, and I advise no man to take unnecessary chances. If you all want to stay, why, stay; but don’t ride ahead of the line, and let me do all the talking. See that your guns are loose—you’ll never have but one chance to pull, and don’t pull till you’re ready. The albino is riding in the middle now, isn’t he? And a little back, playing for a quick drop. Watch him. Who is that on the right? Can it be George Seagrue? Well, this is a bunch. And I guess Karg is with them.”

Holding their horses to a slow walk, the two ​parties gingerly approached each other. When the Cache riders halted the railroad riders halted; and when the three rode the five rode: but the three rode with absolute alignment and acted as one, while Whispering Smith had trouble in holding his men back until the two lines were fifty feet apart.

By this time the youngest of the cowboys had steadied and was thinking hard. Whispering Smith halted. In perfect order and sitting their horses as if they were riding parade, the horses ambling at a snail’s pace, the Cache riders advanced in the sunshine like one man. When Du Sang and his companions reined up, less than twelve feet separated the two lines.

In his tan shirt, Du Sang, with his yellow hair, his white eyelashes, and his narrow face, was the least impressive of the three men. The Norwegian, Seagrue, rode on the right, his florid blood showing under the tan on his neck and arms. He spoke to the cowboys from the ranch, and on the left the young fellow Karg, with the broken nose, black-eyed and alert, looked the men over in front of him and nodded to Dancing. Du Sang and his companions wore short-armed shirts; rifles were slung at their pommels, and revolvers stuck in their hip-scabbards. Whispering Smith, in his dusty suit of khaki, was the only man in either line who ​showed no revolver, but a hammerless or muley Savage rifle hung beside his pommel.

Du Sang, blinking, spoke first: “Which of you fellows is heading this round-up?”

“I am heading the round-up,” said Whispering Smith. “Why? Have we got some of your cattle?”

The two men spoke as quietly as school-teachers. Whispering Smith’s expression in no way changed, except that as he spoke he lifted his eyebrows a little more than usual.

Du Sang looked at him closely as he went on: “What kind of a way is this to treat anybody? To ride into a valley like this and drive a man’s cows away from his door without notice or papers? Is your name Smith?”

“My name is Smith; yours is Du Sang. Yes, I’ll tell you, Du Sang. I carry an inspector’s card from the Mountain Stock Association—do you want to see it? When we get these cattle to the Door, any man in the Cache may come forward and prove his property. I shall leave instructions to that effect when we go, for I want you to go to Medicine Bend with me, Du Sang, as soon as convenient, and the men that are with me will finish the round-up.”

“What do you want me for? There’s no papers out against me, is there?”

​“No, but I’m an officer, Du Sang. I’ll see to the papers; I want you for murder.”

“So they tell me. Well, you’re after the wrong man. But I’ll go with you; I don’t care about that.”

“Neither do I, Du Sang; and as you have some friends along, I won’t break up the party. They may come, too.”

“What for?”

“For stopping a train at Tower W Saturday night.”

The three men looked at one another and laughed.

Du Sang with an oath spoke again: “The men you want are in Canada by this time. I can’t speak for my friends; I don’t know whether they want to go or not. As far as I am concerned, I haven’t killed anybody that I know of. I suppose you’ll pay my expenses back?”

“Why, yes, Du Sang, if you were coming back I would pay your expenses; but you are not coming back. You are riding down Williams Cache for the last time; you’ve ridden down it too many times already. This round-up is especially for you. Don’t deceive yourself; when you ride with me this time out of the Cache, you won’t come back.”

Du Sang laughed, but his blinking eyes were as ​steady as a cat’s. It did not escape Whispering Smith’s notice that the mettlesome horses ridden by the outlaws were continually working around to the right of his party. He spoke amiably to Karg: “If you can’t manage that horse, Karg, I can. Play fair. It looks to me as if you and Du Sang were getting ready to run for it, and leave George Seagrue to shoot his way through alone.”

Du Sang, with some annoyance, intervened: “That’s all right; I’ll go with you. I’d rather see your papers, but if you’re Whispering Smith it’s all right. I’m due to shoot out a little game sometime with you at Medicine Bend, anyway.”

“Any time, Du Sang; only don’t let your hand wabble next time. It’s too close to your gun now to pull right.”

“Well, I told you I was going to come, didn’t I? And I’m coming—now!”

With the last word he whipped out his gun. There was a crash of bullets. Questioned once by McCloud and reproached for taking chances, Whispering Smith answered simply. “I have to take chances,” he said. “All I ask is an even break.”

But Kennedy had said there was no such thing as an even break with Whispering Smith. A few men in a generation amuse, baffle, and mystify other men with an art based on the principle that ​the action of the hand is quicker than the action of the eye. With Whispering Smith the drawing of a revolver and the art of throwing his shots instantly from wherever his hand rested was pure sleight-of-hand. To a dexterity so fatal he added a judgment that had not failed when confronted with deceit. From the moment that Du Sang first spoke, Smith, convinced that he meant to shoot his way through the line, waited only for the moment to come. When Du Sang’s hand moved like a flash of light, Whispering Smith, who was holding his coat lapels in his hands, struck his pistol from the scabbard over his heart and threw a bullet at him before he could fire, as a conjurer throws a vanishing coin into the air. Spurring his horse fearfully as he did so, he dashed at Du Sang and Karg, leaped his horse through their line and, wheeling at arm’s length, shot again. Bill Dancing jumped in his saddle, swayed, and toppled to the ground. Stormy Gorman gave a single whoop at the spectacle and, with his two cowboys at his heels, fled for life.

More serious than all, Smith found himself among three fast revolvers, working from an unmanageable horse. The beast tried to follow the fleeing cowboys, and when faced sharply about showed temper. The trained horses of the outlaws stood like statues, but Smith had to fight with ​

Wheeling at arm's length, shot again.

​his horse bucking at every shot. He threw his bullets as best he could first over one shoulder and then over the other, and used the last cartridge in his revolver with Du Sang, Seagrue, and Karg shooting at him every time they could fire without hitting one another.

It was not the first time the Williams Cache gang had sworn to get him and had worked together to do it, but for the first time it looked as if they might do it. A single chance was left to Whispering Smith for his life, and with his coat slashed with bullets, he took it. For an instant his life hung on the success of a trick so appallingly awkward that a cleverer man might have failed in turning it. If his rifle should play free in the scabbard as he reached for it, he could fall to the ground, releasing it as he plunged from the saddle, and make a fight on his feet. If the rifle failed to release he was a dead man. To so narrow an issue are the cleverest combinations sometimes brought by chance. He dropped his empty revolver, ducked like a mud-hen on his horse’s neck, threw back his leg, and, with all the precision he could summon, caught the grip of his muley in both hands. He made his fall heavily to the ground, landing on his shoulder. But as he keeled from the saddle the last thing that rolled over the saddle, like the flash of a porpoise fin, was ​the barrel of the rifle, secure in his hands. Karg, on horseback, was already bending over him, revolver in hand, but the shot was never fired. A thirty-thirty bullet from the ground knocked the gun into the air and tore every knuckle from Karg’s hand. Du Sang spurred in from the right. A rifle-slug like an axe at the root caught him through the middle. His fingers stiffened. His six-shooter fell to the ground and he clutched his side. Seagrue, ducking low, put spurs to his horse, and Whispering Smith, covered with dust, rose on the battle-field alone.

Hats, revolvers, and coats lay about him. Face downward, the huge bulk of Bill Dancing was stretched motionless in the road. Karg, crouching beside his fallen horse, held up the bloody stump of his gun hand, and Du Sang, fifty yards away, reeling like a drunken man in his saddle, spurred his horse in an aimless circle. Whispering Smith, running softly to the side of his own trembling animal, threw himself into the saddle, and, adjusting his rifle sights as the beast plunged down the draw, gave chase to Seagrue.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article  Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.