Whispering Smith Part 3

CHAPTER XXXI
THE DEATH OF DU SANG

WHISPERING SMITH, with his horse in a lather, rode slowly back twenty minutes later with Seagrue disarmed ahead of him. The deserted battle-ground was alive with men. Stormy Gorman, hot for blood, had come back, captured Karg, and begun swearing all over again, and Smith listened with amiable surprise while he explained that seeing Dancing killed, and not being able to tell from Whispering Smith’s peculiar tactics which side he was shooting at, Gorman and his companions had gone for help. While they angrily surrounded Karg and Seagrue, Smith slipped from his horse where Bill Dancing lay, lifted the huge head from the dust, and tried to turn the giant over. A groan greeted the attempt.

“Bill, open your eyes! Why would you not do as I wanted you to?” he murmured bitterly to himself. A second groan answered him. Smith called for water, and from a canteen drenched the pallid forehead, talking softly meanwhile; but his efforts to restore consciousness were unavailing. ​He turned to where two of the cowboys had dragged Karg to the ground and three others had their old companion Seagrue in hand. While two held huge revolvers within six inches of his head, the third was adjusting a rope-knot under his ear.

Whispering Smith became interested. “Hold on!” said he mildly, “what is loose? What are you going to do?”

“We’re going to hang these fellows,” answered Stormy, with a volley of hair-raising imprecations.

“Oh, no! Just put them on horses under guard.”

“That’s what we’re going to do,” exclaimed the foreman. “Only we’re going to run ’em over to those cottonwoods and drive the horses out from under ’em. Stand still, you tow-headed cow-thief!” he cried, slipping the noose up tight on George Seagrue’s neck.

“See here,” returned Whispering Smith, showing some annoyance, “you may be joking, but I am not. Either do as I tell you or release those men.”

“Well, I guess we are not joking very much. You heard me, didn’t you?” demanded Stormy angrily. “We are going to string these damned critters up right here in the draw on the first tree.”

Whispering Smith drew a pocket-knife and walked to Flat Nose, slit the rope around his neck, ​pushed him out of the circle, and stood in front of him. “You can’t play horse with my prisoners,” he said curtly. “Get over here, Karg. Come, now, who is going to walk in first? You act like a school-boy, Gorman.”

Hard words and a wrangle followed, but Smith did not change expression, and there was a backdown. “Have you fellows let Du Sang get away while you were playing fool here?” he asked.

“Du Sang’s over the hill there on his horse, and full of fight yet,” exclaimed one.

“Then we will look him up,” suggested Smith. “Come, Seagrue.”

“Don’t go over there. He’ll get you if you do,” cried Gorman.

“Let us see about that. Seagrue, you and Karg walk ahead. Don’t duck or run, either of you. Go on.”

Just over the brow of the hill near which the fight had taken place, a man lay below a ledge of granite. The horse from which he had fallen was grazing close by, but the man had dragged himself out of the blinding sun to the shade of the sagebrush above the rock—the trail of it all lay very plain on the hard ground. Watching him narrowly, Smith, with his prisoners ahead and the cowboys riding in a circle behind, approached.

“Du Sang?”

​The man in the sagebrush turned his head.

Smith walked to him and bent down. “Are you suffering much, Du Sang?”

The wounded man, sinking with shock and internal hemorrhage, uttered a string of oaths.

Smith listened quietly till he had done; then he knelt beside him and put his hand on Du Sang’s hand. “Tell me where you are hit, Du Sang. Put your hand to it. Is it the stomach? Let me turn you on your side. Easy. Does your belt hurt? Just a minute, now; I can loosen that.”

“I know you,” muttered Du Sang thickly. Then his eyes—terrible, rolling, pink eyes—brightened and he swore violently.

“Du Sang, you are not bleeding much, but I’m afraid you are badly hit,” said Whispering Smith. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Get me some water.”

A creek flowed at no great distance below the hill, but the cowboys refused to go for water. Whispering Smith would have gone with Seagrue and Karg, but Du Sang begged him not to leave him alone lest Gorman should kill him. Smith canvassed the situation a moment. “I’ll put you on my horse,” said he at length, “and take you down to the creek.”

He turned to the cowboys and asked them to help, but they refused to touch Du Sang.

​Whispering Smith kept his patience. “Karg, take that horse’s head,” said he. “Come here, Seagrue; help me lift Du Sang on the horse. The boys seem to be afraid of getting blood on their hands.”

With Whispering Smith and Seagrue supporting Du Sang in the saddle and Karg leading the horse, the cavalcade moved slowly down to the creek, where a tiny stream purled among the rocks. The water revived the injured man for a moment; he had even strength enough, with some help, to ride again; and, moving in the same halting order, they took him to Rebstock’s cabin. Rebstock, at the door, refused to let the sinking man be brought into the house. He cursed Du Sang as the cause of all the trouble. But Du Sang cursed him with usury, and, while Whispering Smith listened, told Rebstock with bitter oaths that if he had given the boy Barney anything but a scrub horse they never would have been trailed. More than this concerning the affair Du Sang would not say, and never said. The procession turned from the door. Seagrue led the way to Rebstock’s stable, and they laid Du Sang on some hay.

Afterward they got a cot under him. With surprising vitality he talked a long time to Whispering Smith, but at last fell into a stupor. At nine o’clock that night he sat up. Ed Banks and ​Kennedy were standing beside the cot. Du Sang became delirious, and in his delirium called the name of Whispering Smith; but Smith was at Baggs’s cabin with Bill Dancing. In a spasm of pain, Du Sang, opening his eyes, suddenly threw himself back. The cot broke, and the dying man rolled under the feet of the frightened horses. In the light of the lanterns they lifted him back, but he was bleeding slowly at the mouth, quite dead.

The surgeon, afterward, found two fatal wounds upon him. The first shot, passing through the stomach, explained Du Sang’s failure to kill at a distance in which, uninjured, he could have placed five shots within the compass of a silver dollar. Firing for Whispering Smith’s heart, he had, despite the fearful shock, put four bullets through his coat before the rifle-ball from the ground, tearing at right angles across the path of the first bullet, had cut down his life to a question of hours.

Bill Dancing, who had been hit in the head and stunned, had been moved back to the cabin at Mission Spring, and lay in the little bedroom. A doctor at Oroville had been sent for, but had not come. At midnight of the second day, Smith, who was beside his bed, saw him rouse up, and noted the brightness of his eyes as he looked around. “Bill,” he declared hopefully, as he sat beside the ​bed, “you are better, hang it! I know you are. How do you feel?”

“Ain’t that blamed doctor here yet? Then give me my boots. I’m going back to Medicine Bend to Doc Torpy.”

In the morning Whispering Smith, who had cleansed and dressed the wound and felt sure the bullet had not penetrated the skull, offered no objection to the proposal beyond cautioning him to ride slowly. “You can go down part way with the prisoners, Bill,” suggested Whispering Smith. “Brill Young is going to take them to Oroville, and you can act as chairman of the guard.”

Before the party started, Smith called Seagrue to him. “George, you saved my life once. Do you remember—in the Pan Handle? Well, I gave you yours twice in the Cache day before yesterday. I don’t know how badly you are into this thing. If you kept clear of the killing at Tower W I will do what I can for you. Don’t talk to anybody.”

CHAPTER XXXII
McLOUD AND DICKSIE

NEWS of the fight in Williams Cache reached Medicine Bend in the night. Horsemen, filling in the gaps between telephones leading to the north country, made the circuit complete, but the accounts, confused and colored in the repeating, came in a cloud of conflicting rumors. In the streets, little groups of men discussed the fragmentary reports as they came from the railroad offices. Toward morning, Sleepy Cat, nearer the scene of the fight, began sending in telegraphic reports in which truth and rumor were strangely mixed. McCloud waited at the wires all night, hoping for trustworthy advices as to the result, but received none. Even during the morning nothing came, and the silence seemed more ominous than the bad news of the early night. Routine business was almost suspended and McCloud and Rooney Lee kept the wires warm with inquiries, but neither the telephone nor the telegraph would yield any definite word as to what had actually ​happened in the Williams Cache fight. It was easy to fear the worst.

At the noon hour McCloud was signing letters when Dicksie Dunning walked hurriedly up the hall and hesitated in the passageway before the open door of his office. He gave an exclamation as he pushed back his chair. She was in her riding-suit just as she had slipped from her saddle. “Oh, Mr. McCloud, have you heard the awful news? Whispering Smith was killed yesterday in Williams Cache by Du Sang.”

McCloud stiffened a little. “I hope that can’t be true. We have had nothing here but rumors; perhaps it is these that you have heard.”

“No, no! Blake, one of our men, was in the fight and got back at the ranch at nine o’clock this morning. I heard the story myself, and I rode right in to—to see Marion, and my courage failed me—I came here first. Does she know, do you think? Blake saw him fall from the saddle after he was shot, and everybody ran away, and Du Sang and two other men were firing at him as he lay on the ground. He could not possibly have escaped with his life, Blake said; he must have been riddled with bullets. Isn’t it terrible?” She sobbed suddenly, and McCloud, stunned at her words, led her to his chair and bent over her.

​“If his death means this to you, think of what it means to me!”

A flood of sympathy bore them together. The moment was hardly one for interruption, but the despatcher’s door opened and Rooney Lee halted, thunderstruck, on the threshold.

Dicksie’s hand disappeared in her handkerchief. McCloud had been in wrecks before, and gathered himself together unmoved. “What is it, Rooney?”

The very calmness of the two at the table disconcerted the despatcher. He held the message in his hand and shuffled his feet. “Give me your despatch,” said McCloud impatiently.

Quite unable to take his hollow eyes off Dicksie, poor Rooney advanced, handed the telegram to McCloud, and beat an awkward retreat.

McCloud devoured the words of the message at a glance.

“Ah!” he cried, “this is from Gordon himself, sent from Sleepy Cat. He must be safe and unhurt! Listen:

“Three of the Tower W men trailed into Williams Cache. In resisting arrest this morning, Du Sang was wounded and is dying to-night. Two prisoners, Karg and Seagrue. ⁠G. S.

“Those are Gordon’s initials; it is the signature over which he telegraphs me. You see, this ​was sent last night long after Blake left. He is safe; I will stake my life on it.”

Dicksie sank back while McCloud re-read the message. “Oh, isn’t that a relief?” she exclaimed. “But how can it be? I can’t understand it at all; but he is safe, isn’t he? I was heartbroken when I heard he was killed. Marion ought to know of this,” she said, rising. “I am going to tell her.”

“And may I come over after I tell Rooney Lee to repeat this to headquarters?”

“Why, of course, if you want to.”

When McCloud reached the cottage Dicksie met him. “Katie Dancing’s mother is sick, and she has gone home. Poor Marion is all alone this morning, and half dead with a sick headache,” said Dicksie. “But I told her, and she said she shouldn’t mind the headache now at all.”

“But what are you going to do?”

“I am going to get dinner; do you want to help?”

“I’m going to help.”

“Oh, you are? That would be very funny.”

“Funny or not, I’m going to help.”

“You would only be in the way.”

“You don’t know whether I should or not.”

“I know I should do much better if you would go back and run the railroad a few minutes.”

​“The railroad be hanged. I am for dinner.”

“But I will get dinner for you.”

“You need not. I can get it for myself.”

“You are perfectly absurd, and if we stand here disputing, Marion won’t have anything to eat.”

They went into the kitchen disputing about what should be cooked. At the end of an hour they had two fires going—one in the stove and one in Dicksie’s cheeks. By that time it had been decided to have a luncheon instead of a dinner. Dicksie attempted some soup, and McCloud found a strip of bacon, and after he had cooked it, Dicksie, with her riding-skirt pinned up and her sleeves delightfully rolled back, began frying eggs. When Marion, unable longer to withstand the excitement, appeared, the engineer, flushed with endeavor, was making toast.

The three sat down at table together. They found they had forgotten the coffee, but Marion was not allowed to move from her chair. When the coffee was made ready the bacon had been eaten and more had to be fried. McCloud proved able for any part of the programme, and when they rose it was four o’clock and too late, McCloud declared, to go back to the office that afternoon.

Marion and Dicksie, after a time, attempted jointly to get rid of him, but they found they could not, so the three talked about Whispering Smith. ​When the women tried to discourage McCloud by talking hats he played the wheezy piano, and when Dicksie spoke about going home he declared he would ride home with her. But Dicksie had no mind that he should, and when he asked to know why, without realizing what a flush lingered in his face, she said only, no; if she had reasons she would give none. McCloud persisted, because under the flush about his eyes was the resolve that he would take one long ride that evening, in any event. He had made up his mind for that ride—a longer one than he had ever taken before or expected ever to take again—and would not be balked.

Dicksie, insisting upon going home, went so far as to have her horse brought from the stable. To her surprise, a horse for McCloud came over with it. Quiet to the verge of solemnity, but with McCloud following, Dicksie walked with admirable firmness out of the shop to the curb. McCloud gave her rein to her, and with a smile stood waiting to help her mount.

She was drawing on her second glove. “You are not going with me.”

“You’ll let me ride the same road, won’t you—even if I can’t keep up?”

Dicksie looked at his mount. “It would be difficult to keep up, with that horse.”

​“Would you ride away from me just because you have a better horse?”

“No, not just because I have a better horse.”

He looked steadily at her without speaking.

“Why must you ride home with me when I don’t want you to?” she asked reproachfully. Fear had come upon her and she did not know what she was saying. She saw only the expression of his eyes and looked away, but she knew that his eyes followed her. The sun had set. The deserted street lay in the white half-light of a mountain evening, and the day’s radiance was dying in the sky. In lower tones he spoke again, and she turned deadly white.

“I’ve wanted so long to say this, Dicksie, that I might as well be dead as to try to keep it back any longer. That’s why I want to ride home with you if you are going to let me.” He turned to stroke her horse’s head. Dicksie stood seemingly helpless. McCloud slipped his finger into his waistcoat pocket and held something out in his hand. “This shell pin fell from your hair that night you were at camp by the bridge—do you remember? I couldn’t bear to give it back.”

Dicksie’s eyes opened wide. “Let me see it. I don’t think that is mine.”

“Great Heaven! Have I been carrying Marion Sinclair’s pin for a month?” exclaimed ​McCloud. “Well, I won’t lose any time in returning it to her, at any rate.”

“Where are you going?” Dicksie’s voice was faint.

“I’m going to give Marion her pin.”

“Do nothing of the sort! Come here! Give it to me.”

“Dicksie, dare you tell me, after a shock like that, it really is your pin?”

“Oh, I don’t know whose pin it is!”

“Why, what is the matter?”

“Give me the pin!” She put her hands unsteadily up under her hat. “Here, for Heaven’s sake, if you must have something, take this comb!” She slipped from her head the shell that held her knotted hair. He caught her hand and kissed it, and she could not get it away.

“You are dear,” murmured Dicksie, “if you are silly. The reason I wouldn’t let you ride home with me is because I was afraid you might get shot. How do you suppose I should feel if you were killed? Or don’t you think I have any feeling?”

“But, Dicksie, is it all right?”

“How do I know? What do you mean? I will not let you ride home with me, and you will not let me ride home alone. Tie Jim again. I am going to stay with Marion all night.” 

CHAPTER XXXIII
THE LAUGH OF A WOMAN

WITHIN an hour, Marion, working over a hat in the trimming-room, was startled to hear the cottage door open, and to see Dicksie quite unconcernedly walk in. To Marion’s exclamation of surprise she returned only a laugh. “I have changed my mind, dear. I am going to stay all night.”

Marion kissed her approvingly. “Really, you are getting so sensible I shan’t know you, Dicksie. In fact, I believe this is the most sensible thing you were ever guilty of.”

“Glad you think so,” returned Dicksie dryly, unpinning her hat. “I certainly hope it is. Mr. McCloud persuaded me it wasn’t right for me to ride home alone, and I knew better than he what danger there was for him in riding home with me—so here I am. He is coming over for supper, too, in a few minutes.”

When McCloud arrived he brought with him a porterhouse steak, and Marion was again driven ​from the kitchen. At the end of an hour, Dicksie, engrossed over the broiler, was putting the finishing touches to the steak, and McCloud, more engrossed, was watching her, when a diffident and surprised-looking person appeared in the kitchen doorway and put his hand undecidedly on the casing. While he stood, Dicksie turned abruptly to McCloud.

“Oh, by the way, I have forgotten something! Will you do me a favor?”

“Certainly! Do you want money or a pass?”

“No, not money,” said Dicksie, lifting the steak on her forks, “though you might give me a pass.”

“But I should hate to have you go away anywhere——”

“I don’t want to go anywhere, but I never had a pass, and I think it would be kind of nice to have one just to keep. Don’t you?”

“Why, yes; you might put it in the bank and have it drawing interest.”

“This steak is. Do they give interest on passes?”

“Well, a good deal of interest is felt in them—on this division at least. What is the favor?”

“Yes, what is it? How can I think? Oh, I know! If they don’t put Jim in a box stall to-night he will kill some of the horses over there. Will you telephone the stables?”

​“Won’t you give me the number and let me telephone?” asked a voice behind them. They turned in astonishment and saw Whispering Smith. “I am surprised,” he added calmly, “to see a man of your intelligence, George, trying to broil a steak with the lower door of your stove wide open. Close the lower door and cut out the draft through the fire. Don’t stare, George; put back the broiler. And haven’t you made a radical mistake to start with?” he asked, stepping between the confused couple. “Are you not trying to broil a roast of beef?”

“Where did you come from?” demanded McCloud, as Marion came in from the dining-room.

“Don’t search me the very first thing,” protested Whispering Smith.

“But we’ve been frightened to death here for twenty-four hours. Are you really alive and unhurt? This young lady rode in twenty miles this morning and came to the office in tears to get news of you.”

Smith looked mildly at Dicksie. “Did you shed a tear for me? I should like to have seen just one! Where did I come from? I reported in wild over the telephone ten minutes ago. Didn’t Marion tell you? She is so forgetful. That is what causes wrecks, Marion. I have been in the saddle since three o’clock this morning, thank you, and ​have had nothing for five days but raw steer garnished with sunshine.”

The four sat down to supper, and Whispering Smith began to talk. He told the story of the chase to the Cache, the defiance from Rebstock, and the tardy appearance of the men he wanted. “Du Sang meant to shoot his way through us and make a dash for it. There really was nothing else for him to do. Banks and Kennedy were up above, even if he could have ridden out through the upper canyon, which is very doubtful with all the water now. After a little talk back and forth, Du Sang drew, and of course then it was every man for himself. He was hit twice and he died Sunday night, but the other two were not seriously hurt. What can you do? It is either kill or get killed with those fellows, and, of course, I talked plainly to Du Sang. He had butchered a man at Mission Springs just the night before, and deserved hanging a dozen times over. He meant from the start, he told me afterward, to get me. Oh, Miss Dunning, may I have some more coffee? Haven’t I an agreeable part of the railroad business, don’t you think? I shouldn’t have pushed in here to-night, but I saw the lights when I rode by awhile ago; they looked so good I couldn’t resist.”

McCloud leaned forward. “You call it pushing in, do you, Gordon? Do you know what this ​young lady did this morning? One of her cowboys came down from the Cache early with the word that you had been killed in the fight by Du Sang. He said he saw you drop from your saddle to the ground with Du Sang shooting at you. She ordered up her horse, without a word, and rode twenty miles in an hour and a half to find out here what we had heard. She ‘pushed in’ at the Wickiup, where she never had been before in her life, and wandered through it alone looking for my office, to find out from me whether I hadn’t something to contradict the bad news. While we talked, in came your despatch from Sleepy Cat. Never was one better timed! And when she knew you were safe her eyes filled again.”

Whispering Smith looked at Dicksie quizzically. Her confusion was delightful. He rose, lifted her hand in his own, and, bending, kissed it.

They talked till late, and when Dicksie walked out on the porch McCloud followed to smoke. Whispering Smith still sat at the table talking to Marion, and the two heard the sound of the low voices outside. At intervals Dicksie’s laugh came in through the open door.

Whispering Smith, listening, said nothing for some time, but once she laughed peculiarly. He pricked up his ears. “What has been happening since I left town?”

​“What do you mean?” asked Marion Sinclair.

He nodded toward the porch. “McCloud and Dicksie out there. They have been fixing things up.”

“Nonsense! What do you mean?”

“I mean they are engaged.”

“Never in the world!”

“I may be slow in reading a trail,” said Smith modestly, “but when a woman laughs like that I think there’s something doing. Don’t you believe it? Call them in and ask them. You won’t? Well, I will. Take them in separate rooms. You ask her and I’ll ask him.”

In spite of Marion’s protests the two were brought in. “I am required by Mr. Smith to ask you a very silly question, Dicksie,” said Marion, taking her into the living-room. “Answer yes or no. Are you engaged to anybody?”

“What a question! Why, no!”

“Marion Sinclair wants to know just one thing, George,” said Whispering Smith to McCloud after he had taken him into the dark shop. “She feels she ought to know because she is in a way Dicksie’s chaperone, you know, and she feels that you are willing she should know. I don’t want to be too serious, but answer yes or no. Are you engaged to Dicksie?”

“Why, yes. I——”

​“That’s all; go back to the porch,” directed Whispering Smith. McCloud obeyed orders.

Marion, alone in the living-room, was waiting for the inquisitor, and her face wore a look of triumph. “You are not such a mind-reader after all, are you? I told you they weren’t.”

“I told you they were,” contended Whispering Smith.

“She says they are not,” insisted Marion.

“He says they are,” returned Whispering Smith, “And, what’s more, I’ll bet my saddle against the shop they are. I could be mistaken in anything but that laugh.”

CHAPTER XXXIV
A MIDNIGHT VISIT

THE lights, but one, were out. McCloud and Whispering Smith had gone, and Marion was locking up the house for the night, when she was halted by a knock at the shop door. It was a summons that she thought she knew, but the last in the world that she wanted to hear or to answer. Dicksie had gone to the bedroom, and standing between the portières that curtained the work-room from the shop, Marion in the half-light listened, hesitating whether to ignore or to answer the midnight intruder. But experience, and bitter experience, had taught her there was only one way to meet that particular summons, and that was to act, whether at noon or at midnight, without fear. She waited until the knocking had been twice repeated, turned up the light, and going to the door drew the bolt; Sinclair stood before her, and she drew back for him to enter. “Dicksie Dunning is with me to-night,” said Marion, with her hand on the latch, “and we shall have to talk here.”

Sinclair took off his hat. “I knew you had ​company,” he returned in the low, gentle tone that Marion knew very well, “so I came late. And I heard to-night, for the first time, that this railroad crowd is after me—God knows why; but they have to earn their salary somehow. I want to keep out of trouble if I can. I won’t kill anybody if they don’t force me to it. They’ve scared nearly all my men away from the ranch already; one crippled-up cowboy is all I have got to help me look after the cattle. But I won’t quarrel with them, Marion, if I can get away from here peaceably, so I’ve come to talk it over once more with you. I’m going away and I want you to go with me; I’ve got enough to keep us as well as the best of them and as long as we live. You’ve given me a good lesson. I needed it, girlie——”

“Don’t call me that!”

He laughed kindly. “Why, that’s what it used to be; that’s what I want it to be again. I don’t blame you. You’re worth all the women I ever knew, Marion. I’ve learned to appreciate some few things in the lonely months I’ve spent up on the Frenchman; but I’ve felt while I was there as if I were working for both of us. I’ve got a buyer in sight now for the cattle and the land. I’m ready to clean up and say good-by to trouble—all I want is for you to give me the one chance I’ve asked for and go along.”

​They stood facing each other under the dim light. She listened intently to every word, though in her terror she might not have heard or understood all of them. One thing she did very clearly understand, and that was why he had come and what he wanted. To that she held her mind tenaciously, and for that she shaped her answer. “I cannot go with you—now or ever.”

He waited a moment. “We always got along, Marion, when I behaved myself.”

“I hope you always will behave yourself; but I could no more go with you than I could make myself again what I was years ago, Murray. I wish you nothing but good; but our ways parted long ago.”

“Stop and think a minute, Marion. I offer you more and offer it more honestly than I ever offered it before, because I know myself better. I am alone in the world—strong, and better able to care for you than I was when I undertook to——”

“I have never complained.”

“That’s what makes me more anxious to show you now that I can and will do what’s right.”

“Oh, you multiply words! It is too late for you to be here. You are in danger, you say; for the love of Heaven, leave me and go away!”

“You know me, Marion, when my mind is made ​up. I won’t leave without you.” He leaned with one hand against the ribbon showcase. “If you don’t want to go I will stay right here and pay off the scores I owe. Two men here have stirred this country up too long, anyway. I don’t care much how soon anybody gets me after I round them up. But to-night I felt like this: you and I started out in life together, and we ought to live it out or die together, whether it’s to-night, Marion, or twenty years from to-night.”

“If you want to kill me to-night, I have no resistance to make.”

Sinclair sat down on a low counter-stool, and, bending forward, held his head between his hands. “It oughtn’t all to end here. I know you, and I know you want to do what’s right. I couldn’t kill you without killing myself; you know that.” He straightened up slowly. “Here!” He slipped his revolver from his hip-holster and held the grip of the gun toward her. “Use it on me if you want to. It is your chance to end everything; it may save several lives if you do. I won’t leave McCloud here to crow over me, and, by God, I won’t leave you here for Whispering Smith! I’ll settle with him anyhow. Take the pistol! What are you afraid of? Take it! Use it! I don’t want to live without you. If you make me do it, you’re to blame for the consequences.”

​She stood with wide-open eyes, but uttered no word.

“You won’t touch it—then you care a little for me yet,” he murmured.

“No! Do not say so. But I will not do murder.”

“Think about the other, then. Go with me and everything will be all right. I will come back some evening soon for my answer. And until then, if those two men have any use for life, let them keep in the clear. I heard to-night that Du Sang is killed. Do you know whether it is true?”

“It is true.”

An oath half escaping showed how the confirmation cut him. “And Whispering Smith got away! It is Du Sang’s own fault; I told him to keep out of that trap. I stay in the open; and I’m not Du Sang. I’ll choose my own ground for the finish when they want it with me, and when I go I’ll take company—I’ll promise you that. Good-night, Marion. Will you shake hands?”

“No.”

“Damn it, I like your grit, girl! Well, good-night, anyway.”

She closed the door. She had even strength enough to bolt it before his footsteps died away. She put out the light and felt her way blindly back to the work-room. She staggered through it, ​clutching at the curtains, and fell in the darkness into Dicksie’s arms.

“Marion dear, don’t speak,” Dicksie whispered. “I heard everything. Oh, Marion!” she cried, suddenly conscious of the inertness of the burden in her arms. “Oh, what shall I do?”

Moved by fright to her utmost strength, Dicksie drew the unconscious woman back to her room and managed to lay her on the bed. Marion opened her eyes a few minutes later to see the lights burning, to hear the telephone bell ringing, and to find Dicksie on the edge of the bed beside her.

“Oh, Marion, thank Heaven, you are reviving! I have been frightened to death. Don’t mind the telephone; it is Mr. McCloud. I didn’t know what to do, so I telephoned him.”

“But you had better answer him,” said Marion faintly. The telephone bell was ringing wildly.

“Oh, no! he can wait. How are you, dear? I don’t wonder you were frightened to death. Marion, he means to kill us—every one!”

“No, Dicksie. He will kill me and kill himself; that is where it will end. Dicksie, do answer the telephone. What are you thinking of? Mr. McCloud will be at the door in five minutes. Do you want him in the street to-night?”

Dicksie fled to the telephone, and an excited conference over the wire closed in seeming ​reassurance at both ends. By that time Marion had regained her steadiness, but she could not talk of what had passed. At times, as the two lay together in the darkness, Marion spoke, but it was not to be answered. “I do not know,” she murmured once wearily. “Perhaps I am doing wrong; perhaps I ought to go with him. I wish, oh, I wish I knew what I ought to do!”

CHAPTER XXXV
THE CALL

BEYOND receiving reports from Kennedy and Banks, who in the interval rode into town and rode out again on their separate and silent ways, Whispering Smith for two days seemed to do nothing. Yet instinct keener than silence kept the people of Medicine Bend on edge during those two days, and when President Bucks’s car came in on the evening of the second day, the town knew from current rumors that Banks had gone to the Frenchman ranch with a warrant on a serious charge for Sinclair. In the president’s car Bucks and McCloud, after a late dinner, were joined by Whispering Smith, and the president heard the first connected story of the events of the fortnight that had passed. Bucks made no comment until he had heard everything. “And they rode Sinclair’s horses,” he said in conclusion.

“Sinclair’s horses,” returned Whispering Smith, “and they are all accounted for. One horse supplied by Rebstock was shot where they crossed Stampede Creek. It had given out and they had ​a fresh horse in the willows, for they shot the scrub half a mile up one of the canyons near the crossing. The magpies attracted my attention to it. A piece of skin a foot square had been cut out of the flank.”

“You got there before the birds.”

“It was about an even thing,” said Smith. “Anyway, we were there in time to see the horse.”

“And Sinclair was away from the ranch from Saturday noon till Sunday night?”

“A rancher living over on Stampede Creek saw the five men when they crossed Saturday afternoon. The fellow was scared and lied to me about it, but he told Wickwire who they were.”

“Now, who is Wickwire?” asked Bucks.

“You ought to remember Wickwire, George,” remarked Whispering Smith, turning to McCloud. “You haven’t forgotten the Smoky Creek wreck? Do you remember the tramp who had his legs crushed and lay in the sun all morning? You put him in your car and sent him down here to the railroad hospital and Barnhardt took care of him. That was Wickwire. Not a bad fellow, either; he can talk pretty straight and shoot pretty straight. How do I know? Because he has told me the story and I’ve seen him shoot. There, you see, is one friend that you never reckoned on. He used to be a cowboy, and I got him a job working for ​Sinclair on the Frenchman; he has worked at Dunning’s and other places on the Crawling Stone. He hates Sinclair with a deadly hatred for some reason. Just lately Wickwire set up for himself on Little Crawling Stone.”

“I have noticed that fellow’s ranch,” remarked McCloud.

“I couldn’t leave him at Sinclair’s,” continued Whispering Smith frankly. “The fellow was on my mind all the time. I felt certain he would kill Sinclair or get killed if he stayed there. And then, when I took him away they sprang Tower W on me! That is the price, not of having a conscience, for I haven’t any, but of listening to the voice that echoes where my conscience used to be,” said the railroad man, moving uneasily in his chair.

Bucks broke the ash from his cigar into the tray on the table. “You are restless to-night, Gordon—and it isn’t like you, either.”

“It is in the air. There has been a dead calm for two days. Something is due to happen to-night. I wish I could hear from Banks; he started with the papers for Sinclair’s yesterday while I went to Oroville to sweat Karg. Blood-poisoning has set in and it is rather important to us to get a confession. There’s a horse!” He stepped to the window. “Coming fast, too. Now, I wonder—no, he’s gone by.”

​Five minutes later a messenger came to the car from the Wickiup with word that Kennedy was looking for Whispering Smith. Bucks, McCloud, and Smith left the car together and walked up to McCloud’s office.

Kennedy, sitting on the edge of the table, was tapping his leg nervously with a ruler. “Bad news, Gordon.”

“Not from Ed Banks?”

“Sinclair got him this morning.”

Whispering Smith sat down. “Go on.”

“Banks and I picked up Wickwire on the Crawling Stone early, and we rode over to the Frenchman. Wickwire said Sinclair had been up at Williams Cache the day before, and he didn’t think he was home. Of course I knew the Cache was watched and he wouldn’t be there long, so Ed asked me to stay in the cottonwoods and watch the creek for him. He and Wickwire couldn’t find anybody home when they got to the ranch-house and they rode down the corral together to look over the horses.”

Whispering Smith’s hand fell helplessly on the table. “Rode down together! For God’s sake, why didn’t one of them stay at the house?”

“Sinclair rode out from behind the barn and hit Wickwire in the arm before they saw him. Banks turned and opened on him, and Wickwire ​ducked for the creek. Sinclair put a soft bullet through Banks’s shoulder—tore it pretty bad, Gordon—and made his get-away before Wickwire and I could reach the barn again. I got Ed on his horse and back to Wickwire’s, and we sent one of the boys to Oroville for a doctor. After Banks fell out of the saddle and was helpless Sinclair talked to him before I came up. ‘You ought to have kept out of this, Ed,’ he said. ‘This is a railroad fight. Why didn’t they send the head of their own gang after me?’—naming you.” Kennedy nodded toward Whispering Smith.

“Naming me.”

“Banks says, ‘I’m sheriff of this county, and will be a long time yet!’ I took the papers from his breast pocket,” continued Kennedy. “You can see where he was hit.” Kennedy laid the sheriff’s packet on the table. Bucks drew his chair forward and, with his cigar between his fingers, picked the packet up and opened it. Kennedy went on: “Ed told Sinclair if he couldn’t land him himself that he knew a man who could and would before he was a week older. He meant you, Gordon, and the last thing Ed told me was that he wanted you to serve the papers on Sinclair.”

A silence fell on the company. One of the documents passing under Bucks’s hand caught his eye and he opened it. It was the warrant for Sinclair. ​He read it without comment, folded it, and, looking at Whispering Smith, pushed it toward him. “Then this, I guess, Gordon, belongs to you.”

Starting from a revery, Whispering Smith reached for the warrant. He looked for a moment at the blood-stained caption. “Yes,” he said, “this, I guess, belongs to me.

CHAPTER XXXVI
DUTY

THE stir of the town over the shooting of Banks seemed to Marion, in her distress, to point an accusing finger at her. The disgrace of what she had felt herself powerless to prevent now weighed on her mind, and she asked herself whether, after all, the responsibility of this murder was not upon her. Even putting aside this painful doubt, she bore the name of the man who had savagely defied accountability and now, it seemed to her, was dragging her with him through the slough of blood and dishonor into which he had plunged.

The wretched thought would return that had she listened to him, had she consented to go away, this outbreak might have been prevented. And what horror might not another day bring—what lives still closer to her life be taken? For herself she cared less; but she knew that Sinclair, now that he had begun, would not stop. In whichever way her thoughts turned, wretchedness was upon them, and the day went in one of those ​despairing and indecisive battles that each one within his own heart must fight at times with heaviness and doubt.

McCloud called her over the telephone in the afternoon to say that he was going West on the evening train and would not be over for supper. She wished he could have come, for her loneliness began to be insupportable.

Toward sunset she put on her hat and started for the post-office. In the meantime, Dicksie, at home, had called McCloud up and told him she was coming down for the night. He immediately cancelled his plans for going West, and when Marion returned at dusk she found him with Dicksie at the cottage. The three had supper. Afterward Dicksie and McCloud went out for a walk, and Marion was alone in the house when the shop door opened and Whispering Smith walked in. It was dusk.

“Don’t light the lamps, Marion,” he said, sitting down on a counter-stool as he took off his hat. “I want to talk to you just a minute, if you don’t mind. You know what has happened. I am called on now to go after Sinclair. I have tried to avoid it, but my hand has been forced. To-day I’ve been placing horses. I am going to ride to-night with the warrant. I have given him a start of twenty-four hours, hoping he may get out of ​the country. To stay here means only death to him in the end, and, what is worse, the killing of more and innocent men. But he won’t leave the country; do you think he will?”

“Oh, I do not know! I am afraid he will not.”

“I do not think I have ever hesitated before at any call of this kind; nor at what such a call will probably sometime mean; but this man I have known since we were boys.”

“If I had never seen him!”

“That brings up another point that has been worrying me all day. I could not help knowing what you have had to go through in this country. It is a tough country for any woman. Your people and mine were always close together and I have felt bound to do what I could to——”

“Don’t be afraid to say it—make my path easier.”

“Something like that, though there’s been little real doing. What this situation in which Sinclair is now placed may still mean to you I do not know, but I would not add a straw to the weight of your troubles. I came to-night to ask a plain question. If he doesn’t leave the country I have got to meet him. You know what, in all human probability, that will mean. From such a meeting only one of us can come back. Which shall it be?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand you—do you ​ask me this question? How can I know which it shall be? What is it you mean?”

“I mean I will not take his life in a fight—if it comes to that—if you would rather he should come back.”

A sob almost refused an answer to him. “How can you ask me so terrible a question?”

“It is a question that means a good deal to me, of course, and I don’t know just what it means to you: that is the point I am up against. I may have no choice in the matter, but I must decide what to try to do if I have one. Am I to remember first that he is your husband?”

There was a silence. “What shall I say—what can I say? God help me, how am I to answer a question like that?”

“How am I to answer it?”

Her voice was low and pitiful when her answer came: “You must do your duty.”

“What is my duty then? To serve the paper that has been given to me, I know—but not necessarily to defend my life at the price of his. The play of a chance lies in deciding that; I can keep the chance or give it away; that is for you to say. Or take the question of duty again. You are alone and your friends are few. Haven’t I any duty toward you, perhaps? I don’t know a woman’s heart. I used to think I did, but I don’t. ​My duty to this company that I work for is only the duty of a servant. If I go, another takes my place; it means nothing except taking one name off the payroll and putting another on. Whatever he may have done, this man is your husband; if his death would cause you a pang, it shall not be laid at my door. We ought to understand each other on that point fairly before I start to-night.”

“Can you ask me whether you ought not to take every means to defend your own life? or whether any consideration ought to come before that? I think not. I should be a wicked woman if I were to wish evil to him, wretched as he has made me. I am a wretched woman, whichever way I turn. But I should be less than human if I could say that to me your death would not be a cruel, cruel blow.”

There was a moment of silence. “Dicksie understood you to say that you were in doubt as to whether you ought to go away with him when he asked you to go. That is why I was unsettled in my mind.”

“The only reason why I doubted was that I thought by going I might save better lives than mine. I could willingly give up my life to do that. But to stain it by going back to such a man—God help me!”

“I think I understand. If the unfortunate ​should happen before I come back I hope only this: that you will not hate me because I am the man on whom the responsibility has fallen. I haven’t sought it. And if I should not come back at all, it is only—good-by.”

He saw her clasp her hands convulsively. “I will not say it! I will pray on my knees that you do come back.”

“Good-night, Marion. Some one is at the cottage door.”

“It is probably Mr. McCloud and Dicksie. I will let them in.”

CHAPTER XXXVII
WICKWIRE

McCLOUD and Dicksie met them at the porch door. Marion, unnerved, went directly to her room. Whispering Smith stopped to speak to Dicksie and McCloud interposed. “Bob Scott telephoned the office just now he had a man from Oroville who wanted to see you right away, Gordon,” said he. “I told him to send him over here. It is Wickwire.”

“Wickwire,” repeated Whispering Smith. “Wickwire has no business here that I know of; no doubt it is something I ought to know of. And, by the way, you ought to see this man,” he said, turning again to Dicksie. “If McCloud tells the story right, Wickwire is a sort of protégé of yours, Miss Dicksie, though neither of you seems to have known it. He is the tramp cowboy who was smashed up in the wreck at Smoky Creek. He is not a bad man, but whiskey, you know, beats some decent men.” A footstep fell on the porch. “There he comes now, I reckon. Shall I let him in a minute?”

​“Oh, I should like to see him! He has been at the ranch at different times, you know.”

Smith opened the door and stepping out on the porch, talked with the new-comer. In a moment he brought him in. Dicksie had seated herself on the sofa, McCloud stood in the doorway of the dining-room, and Whispering Smith laid one arm on the table as he sat down beside it with his face above the dark shade of the lamp. Before him stood Wickwire. The half-light threw him up tall and dark, but it showed the heavy shock of black hair falling over his forehead, and the broad, thin face of a mountain man.

“He has just been telling me that Seagrue is loose,” Whispering Smith explained pleasantly. “Who turned the trick, Wickwire?”

“Sheriff Coon and a deputy jailer started with Seagrue for Medicine Bend this morning. Coming through Horse Eye Canyon, Murray Sinclair and Barney Rebstock got a clean drop on them, took Seagrue, and they all rode off together. They didn’t make any bones about it, either. Their gang has got lots of friends over there, you know. They rode into Atlantic City and stayed over an hour. Coon tracked them there and got up a posse of six men. The three were standing in front of the bank when the sheriff rode into town. Sinclair and Seagrue got on their horses and started off. ​Rebstock went back to get another drink. When he came out of the saloon he gave the posse a gun-fight all by himself, and wounded two men and made his get-away.”

Whispering Smith shook his head, and his hand fell on the table with a tired laugh. “Barney Rebstock,” he murmured, “of all men! Coward, skate, filler-in! Barney Rebstock—stale-beer man, sneak, barn-yard thief! Hit two men!” He turned to McCloud. “What kind of a wizard is Murray Sinclair? What sort of red-blood toxin does he throw into his gang to draw out a spirit like that? Murray Sinclair belongs to the race of empire-builders. By Heaven, it is pitiful a man like that should be out of a job! England, McCloud, needs him. And here he is holding up trains on the mountain division!”

“They are all up at Oroville with the Williams Cache gang, celebrating,” continued Wickwire.

Whispering Smith looked at the cowboy. “Wickwire, you made a good ride and I thank you. You are all right. This is the young lady and this is the man who had you sent to the hospital from Smoky Creek,” he added, rising. “You can thank them for picking you up. When you leave here tell Bob Scott to meet me at the Wickiup with the horses at eleven o’clock, will you?” He turned to Dicksie in a gentle aside. “I ​am riding north to-night—I wish you were going part way.”

Dicksie looked at him intently. “You are worried over something,” she murmured; “I can see it in your face.”

“Nothing more than usual. I thrive, you know, on trouble—and I’m sorry to say good-night so early, but I have a long ride ahead.” He stepped quietly past McCloud and out of the door.

Wickwire was thanking Dicksie when unwillingly she let Whispering Smith’s hand slip out of her own. “I shore wouldn’t have been here to-night if you two hadn’t picked me up,” laughed Wickwire, speaking softly to Dicksie when she turned to him. “I’ve knowed my friends a long time, but I reckon they all didn’t know me.”

“I’ve known you longer than you think,” returned Dicksie with a smile. “I’ve seen you at the ranch-house. But now that we really do know each other, please remember you are always sure of a home at the ranch—whenever you want one, Mr. Wickwire, and just as long as you want one. We never forget our friends on the Crawling Stone.”

“If I may make so bold, I thank you kindly. And if you all will let me run away now, I want to catch Mr. Whispering Smith for just one minute.”

​Wickwire overtook Smith in Fort Street. “Talk quick, Wickwire,” he said; “I’m in a hurry. What do you want?”

“Partner, I’ve always played fair with you.”

“So far as I know, Wickwire, yes. Why?”

“I’ve got a favor to ask.”

“What is it—money?”

“No, partner, not money this time. You’ve always been more than liberal with me. But so far I’ve had to keep under cover; you asked me to. I want to ask the privilege now of coming out into the open. The jig is up so far as watching anybody goes.”

“Yes.”

“There’s nobody to watch any more—they’re all to chase, I reckon, now. The open is my kind of a fight, anyway. I want to ride out this manhunt with you.”

“How is your arm?”

“My arm is all right, and there ought to be a place for me in the chase now that Ed Banks is out of it. I want to cut loose up on the range, anyhow; if I’m a man I want to know it, and if I ain’t I want to know it. I want to ride with you after Seagrue and Sinclair and Barney Rebstock.”

Whispering Smith spoke coldly: “You mean, Wickwire, you want to get killed.”

​“Why, partner, if it’s coming to me, I don’t mind—yes.”

“What’s the use, Wickwire?”

“If I’m a man I want to know it; if I ain’t, it’s time my friends knowed it. Anyhow, I’m man enough to work out with some of that gang. Most of them have put it over me one time or another; Sinclair pasted me like a blackbird only the other day. They all say I’m nothing but a damned tramp. You say I have done you service—give me a show.”

Whispering Smith stopped a minute in the shadow of a tree and looked keenly at him. “I’m too busy to-night to say much, Wickwire,” he said after a moment. “You go over to the barn and report to Bob Scott. If you want to take the chances, it is up to you; and if Bob Scott is agreeable, I’ll use you where I can—that’s all I can promise. You will probably have more than one chance to get killed.”

CHAPTER XXXVIII
INTO THE NORTH

THE moon had not yet risen, and in the darkness of Boney Street Smith walked slowly toward his room. The answer to his question had come. The rescue of Seagrue made it clear that Sinclair would not leave the country. He well knew that Sinclair cared no more for Seagrue than for a prairie-dog. It was only that he felt strong enough, with his friends and sympathizers, to defy the railroad force and Whispering Smith, and planned now, probably, to kill off his pursuers or wear them out. There was a second incentive for remaining: nearly all the Tower W money had been hidden at Rebstock’s cabin by Du Sang. That Kennedy had already got hold of it Sinclair could not know, but it was certain that he would not leave the country without an effort to recover the booty from Rebstock.

Whispering Smith turned the key in the door of his room as he revolved the situation in his mind. Within, the dark was cheerless, but he made no effort to light a lamp. Groping his way to the side ​the low bed, he sat down and put his head between his hands to think.

There was no help for it that he could see: he must meet Sinclair. The situation he had dreaded most, from the moment Bucks asked him to come back to the mountains, had come.

He thought of every phase of the outcome. If Sinclair should kill him the difficulties were less. It would be unpleasant, certainly, but something that might happen any time and at any man’s hands. He had cut into the game too long ago and with his eyes too wide open to complain at this time of the possibility of an accident. They might kill each other; but if, escaping himself, he should kill Sinclair——

He came back in the silence always to that if. It rose dark between him and the woman he loved—whom he had loved since she was a child with school-girl eyes and braided hair. After he had lost her, only to find years afterward that she was hardly less wretched in her life than he in his, he had dreamed of the day when she might again be free and he free to win a love long hoped for.

But to slay this man—her husband—in his inmost heart he felt it would mean the raising of a bar as impalpable as fate, and as undying, to all his dreams. Deserved or not, whatever she should say or not say, what would she feel? How could ​her husband’s death in that encounter, if it ever came, be other than a stain that must shock and wound her, no matter how much she should try not to see. Could either of them ever quite forget it?

Kennedy and his men were guarding the Cache. Could they be sent against Sinclair? That would be only a baser sort of murder—the murder of his friends. He himself was leader, and so looked upon; the post of danger was his.

He raised his head. Through the window came a faint light. The moon was rising, and against the inner wall of the room the straight, hard lines of the old wardrobe rose dimly. The rifles were within. He must choose.

He walked to the window and pushed the curtain aside. It was dark everywhere across the upper town, but in the distance one light burned. It was in Marion’s cottage. He had chosen this room because from the window he could see her home. He stood for a few moments with his hands in his pockets, looking. When he turned away he drew the shade closely, lighted a lamp, and unlocked the wardrobe door.

Scott left the barn at half-past ten with a led horse for Whispering Smith. He rode past ​Smith’s room in Fort Street, but the room was dark, and he jogged down to the Wickiup square, where he had been told to meet him. After waiting and riding about for an hour, he tied the horses and went up to McCloud’s office. McCloud was at his desk, but knew nothing of Whispering Smith except that he was to come in before he started. “He’s a punctual man,” murmured Bob Scott, who had the low voice of the Indian. “Usually he is ahead of time.”

“Is he in his room, do you think?” asked McCloud.

“I rode around that way about fifteen minutes ago; there was no light.”

“He must be there,” declared McCloud. “Have you the horses below? We will ride over and try the room again.”

Fort Street back of Front is so quiet after eleven o’clock at night that a footfall echoes in it. McCloud dismounted in front of the bank building and, throwing the reins to Bob Scott, walked upstairs and back toward Smith’s room. In the hallway he paused. He heard faint strains of music. They came from within the room—fragments of old airs played on a violin, and subdued by a mute, in the darkness. Instinct stayed McCloud’s hand at the door. He stood until the music ceased and footsteps moved about in the ​room; then he knocked, and a light appeared within. Whispering Smith opened the door. He stood in his trousers and shirt, with his cartridge-belt in his hand. “Come in, George. I’m just getting hooked up.”

“Which way are you going to-night, Gordon?” asked McCloud, sitting down on the chair.

“I am going to Oroville. The crowd is celebrating there. It is a défi, you know.”

“Who are you going to take with you?”

“Nobody.”

McCloud moved uneasily. “I don’t like that.”

“There will be nothing doing. Sinclair may be gone by the time I arrive, but I want to see Bob and Gene Johnson, and scare the Williams Cache coyotes, just to keep their tails between their legs.”

“I’d like to kill off half a dozen of that gang.”

Whispering Smith said nothing for a moment. “Did you ever have to kill a man, George?” he asked buckling his cartridge-belt.

“No. Why?”

There was no reply. Smith had taken a rifle from the rack and was examining the firing mechanism. He worked the lever for a moment with lightning-like speed, laid the gun on the bed, and sat down beside it.

“You would hardly believe, George, how I hate to go after Murray Sinclair. I’ve known him all ​my life. His folks and mine lived across the street from one another for twenty years. Which is the older? Murray is five years older than I am; he was always a big, strong, good-looking fellow.” Whispering Smith put his hands on the side of the bed. “It is curious how you remember things that happened when you were a boy, isn’t it? I thought of something to-night I hadn’t thought of for twenty years. A little circus came to town. While they were setting up the tent the lines for the gasolene tank got fouled in the block at the top of the centre pole. The head canvasman offered a quarter to any boy that would climb the pole and free the block. One boy after another tried it, but they couldn’t climb half-way up. Then Murray sailed in. I was seven years old and Murray was twelve, and he wore a vest. He gave me the vest to hold while he went up. I felt like a king. There was a lead-pencil in one pocket, beautifully sharpened, and I showed it to the other boys. Did he make good? He always made good,” said Whispering Smith gloomily. “The canvasman gave him the quarter and two tickets, and he gave one of the tickets to me. I got to thinking about that to-night. As boys, Murray and I never had a quarrel.” He stopped. McCloud said nothing, and, after an interval, Smith spoke again:

​“He was an oracle for all the small boys in town, and could advise us on any subject on earth—whether he knew anything about it or nothing about it made no difference. I told him once I wanted to be a California stage-robber, and he replied without an instant’s hesitation that I ought to begin to practise running. I was so upset at his grasp of the subject that I hadn’t the nerve to ask him why I needed to practise running to be a stage-robber. I was ashamed of appearing green and to this day I’ve never understood what he meant. Whether it was to run after the stage or to run away from it I couldn’t figure out. Perhaps my being too proud to ask the question changed my career. He went away for a long time, and we heard he was in the Black Hills. When he came back, my God! what a hero he was.”

Bob Scott knocked at the door and Whispering Smith opened it. “Tired of waiting, Bob? Well, I guess I’m ready. Is the moon up? This is the rifle I’m going to take, Bob. Did Wickwire have a talk with you? He’s all right. Suppose you send him to the mouth of Little Crawling Stone to watch things a day or two. They may try to work north that way or hide in the wash.”

Walking down to the street, Whispering Smith continued his suggestions. “And by the way, Bob, I want you to pass this word for me up and ​down Front Street. Sinclair has his friends in town and it’s all right—I know them and expect them to stay by him. I expect Murray’s friends to do what they can for him. I’ve got my friends and expect them to stay by me. But there is one thing that I will not stand for on any man’s part, and that is hiding Sinclair anywhere in Medicine Bend. You keep him out of Medicine Bend, Bob; will you do it? And remember, I will never let up on the man who hides him in town while this fight is on. There are good reasons for drawing the line on that point, and there I draw it hard and fast. Now Bob and Gene Johnson were at Oroville when you left, were they, Bob?” He was fastening his rifle in the scabbard. “Which is deputy sheriff this year, Bob or Gene? Gene—very good.” He swung into the saddle.

“Have you got everything?” murmured Scott.

“I think so. Stop! I’m riding away without my salt-bag. That would be a pretty piece of business, wouldn’t it? Take the key, Bob. It’s hanging between the rifles and the clock. Here’s the wardrobe key, too.”

There was some further talk when Scott came back with the salt, chiefly about horses and directions as to telephoning. Whispering Smith took up a notch again in his belt, pulled down his hat, and bent over the neck of his horse to lay his ​hand a moment in McCloud’s. It was one o’clock. Across the foothills the moon was rising, and Whispering Smith straightening up in the saddle wheeled his horse and trotted swiftly up the street into the silent north.

CHAPTER XXXIX
AMONG THE COYOTES

OROVILLE once marked farthest north for the Peace River gold camps, but with mining long ago abandoned it now marks farthest south for a rustler’s camp, being a favorite resort for the people of the Williams Cache country. Oroville boasts that it has never surrendered and that it has never been cleaned out. It has moved, and been moved, up stream and down, and from bank to bank; it has been burned out and blown away and lived on wheels: but it has never suffered the loss of its identity. Oroville is said to have given to its river the name of Peace River—either wholly in irony or because in Oroville there was for many years no peace save in the river. However, that day, too, is past, and Peace County has its sheriff and a few people who are not habitually “wanted.”

Whispering Smith, well dusted with alkali, rode up to the Johnson ranch, eight miles southwest of Oroville, in the afternoon of the day after he left Medicine Bend. The ranch lies in a valley ​watered by the Rainbow, and makes a pretty little oasis of green in a limitless waste of sagebrush. Gene and Bob Johnson were cutting alfalfa when Whispering Smith rode into the field, and, stopping the mowers, the three men talked while the seven horses nibbled the clover.

“I may need a little help, Gene, to get him out of town,” remarked Smith, after he had told his story; “that is, if there are too many Cache men there for me.”

Bob Johnson was stripping a stalk of alfalfa in his fingers. “Them fellows are pretty sore.”

“That comes of half doing a job, Bob. I was in too much of a hurry with the round-up. They haven’t had dose enough yet,” returned Whispering Smith. “If you and Gene will join me sometime when I have a week to spare, we will go in there, clean up the gang and burn the hair off the roots of the chapparal—what? I’ve hinted to Rebstock he could get ready for something like that.”

“Tell us about that fight, Gordon.”

“I will if you will give me something to eat and have this horse taken care of. Then, Bob, I want you to ride into Oroville and reconnoitre. This is mail day and I understand some of the boys are buying postage stamps to put on my coffin.”

​They went to the house, where Whispering Smith talked as he ate. Bob took a horse and rode away, and Gene, with his guest, went back to the alfalfa, where Smith took Bob’s place on the mower. When they saw Bob riding up the valley, Whispering Smith, bringing in the machine, mounted his horse.

“Your man is there all right,” said Bob, as he approached. “He and John Rebstock were in the Blackbird saloon. Seagrue isn’t there, but Barney Rebstock and a lot of others are. I talked a few minutes with John and Murray. Sinclair didn’t say much; only that the railroad gang was trying to run him out of the country, and he wanted to meet a few of them before he went. I just imagined he held up a little before me; maybe not. There’s a dozen Williams Cache men in town.”

“But those fellows are not really dangerous, Bob, though they may be troublesome,” observed Smith reflectively.

“Well, what’s your plan?” blurted Gene Johnson.

“I haven’t any, Gene,” returned Smith, with perfect simplicity. “My only plan is to ride into town and serve my papers, if I can. I’ve got a deputyship—and that I’m going to do right away. If you, Bob, or both of you, will happen in about thirty minutes later you’ll get the news and ​perhaps see the fun. Much obliged for your feed, Gene; come down to Medicine Bend any time and I’ll fill you up. I want you both for the elk hunt next fall, remember that. Bucks is coming, and is going to bring Brown and Henson and perhaps Atterbury and Gibbs and some New Yorkers; and McCloud’s brother, the preacher, is coming out and they are all right—all of them.”

The only street in Oroville faces the river, and the buildings string for two or three blocks along modest bluffs. Not a soul was anywhere in sight when Whispering Smith rode into town, save that across the street from where he dismounted and tied his horse three men stood in front of the Blackbird.

They watched the new arrival with languid interest. Smith walked stiffly over toward the saloon to size up the men before he should enter it. The middle man of the group, with a thin red face and very blue eyes, was chewing tobacco in an unpromising way. Before Smith was half-way across the street he saw the hands of the three men falling to their hips. Taking care, however, only to keep the men between him and the saloon door, Smith walked directly toward them. “Boys, have you happened to see Gene or Bob Johnson to-day, any of you?” He threw back the brim of his Stetson as he spoke.

​“Hold your hand right there—right where it is,” said the blue-eyed man sharply.

Whispering Smith smiled, but held his hand rather awkwardly upon his hat-brim.

“No,” continued the spokesman, “we ain’t none of us happened to see Bob or Gene Johnson to-day; but we happen to seen Whispering Smith, and we’ll blow your face off if you move it an inch.”

Smith laughed. “I never quarrel with a man that’s got the drop on me, boys. Now, this is sudden but unexpected. Do I know any of you?” He looked from one face to another before him, with a wide reach in his field of vision for the three hands that were fast on three pistol-butts. “Hold on! I’ve met you somewhere,” he said with easy confidence to the blue-eyed man with the weather-split lip. “Williams Cache, wasn’t it? All right, we’re placed. Now what have you got in for me?”

“I’ve got forty head of steers in for you,” answered the man in the middle, with a splitting oath. “You stole forty head of my steers in that round-up, and I’m going to fill you so full of lead you’ll never run off no more stock for nobody. Don’t look over there to your horse or your rifle. Hold your hands right where they are.”

“Certainly, certainly!”

“When I pull, I shoot!”

“I don’t always do it, but it is business, I ​acknowledge. When a man pulls he ought to shoot—very often it’s the only chance he ever gets to shoot. Well, it isn’t every man gets the drop on me that easy, but you boys have got it,” continued Whispering Smith in frank admiration. “Only I want to say you’re after the wrong man. That round-up was all Rebstock’s fault, and Rebstock is bound to make good all loss and damage.”

“You’ll make good my share of it right now and here,” said the man with the wash-blue eyes.

“Why, of course,” assented Whispering Smith, “if I must, I must. I suppose I may light a cigarette, boys, before you turn loose the fireworks?”

“Light it quick!”

Laughing at the humor of the situation, Whispering Smith, his eyes beaming with good-nature, put the finger and thumb of his right hand into his waistcoat pocket, drew out a package of cigarette paper, and, bantering his captors innocently the while, tore out a sheet and put the packet back. Folding the paper in his two hands, he declared he believed his tobacco was in his saddle-pocket, and asked leave to step across the street to get it. The trick was too transparent, and leave was refused with scorn and some hard words. Whispering Smith begged the men in front of him in turn for tobacco. They cursed him and shook their heads.

​For an instant he looked troubled. Still appealing to them with his eyes, he tapped lightly the lower outside pockets of his coat with his fingers, shifting the cigarette paper from hand to hand as he hunted. The outside pockets seemed empty. But as he tapped the inside breast pocket on the left side of the coat—the three men, lynx-eyed, watching—his face brightened. “Stop!” said he, his voice sinking to a relieved whisper as his hand rested lightly on the treasure. “There’s the tobacco. I suppose one of you will give me a match?”

All that the three before him could ever afterward recollect—and for several years afterward they cudgelled their brains pretty thoroughly about that moment—was that Whispering Smith took hold of the left lapel of his coat to take the tobacco out of the breast pocket. An excuse to take that lapel in his left hand was, in fact, all that Whispering Smith needed to put not alone the three men before him but all Oroville at his mercy. The play of his right hand in crossing the corduroy waistcoat to pull his revolver from its scabbard and throw it into their faces was all too quick for better eyes than theirs. They saw only the muzzle of the heavy Colt’s playing like a snake’s tongue under their surprised noses, with the good-natured smile still behind it. “Or will ​one of you roll a cigarette?” asked Whispering Smith, without a break between the two questions. “I don’t smoke. Now don’t make faces; go right ahead. Do anything you want to with your hands. I wouldn’t ask a man to keep his hands or feet still on a hot day like this,” he insisted, the revolver playing all the time. “You won’t draw? You won’t fight? Pshaw! Then disengage your hands gently from your guns. You fellows really ought not to attempt to pull a gun in Oroville, and I will tell you why—there’s a reason for it.” He looked confidential as he put his head forward to whisper among the crestfallen faces. “At this altitude it is too fast work. I know you now,” he went on as they continued to wilt. “You are Fatty Filber,” he said to the thin chap. “Don’t work your mouth like that at me; don’t do it. You seem surprised. Really, have you the asthma? Get over it, because you are wanted in Pound County for horse-stealing. Why, hang it, Fatty, you’re good for ten years, and of course, since you have reminded me of it, I’ll see that you get it. And you, Baxter,” said he to the man on the right, “I know I spoke to you once when I was inspector about altering brands; that’s five years, you know. You,” he added, scrutinizing the third man to scare him to death—“I think you were at Tower W. No? No matter; you two boys may go, ​anyway. Fatty, you stay; we’ll put some state cow on your ribs. By the way, are you a detective, Fatty? Aren’t you? See here! I can get you into an association. For ten dollars, they give you a German-silver star, and teach the Japanese method of pulling, by correspondence. Or you might get an electric battery to handle your gun with. You can get pocket dynamos from the mail-order houses. Sure! Read the big book!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XL
A SYMPATHETIC EAR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DICKSIE'S RIDE

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

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

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

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

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

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

He stared without reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It can’t be helped.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

She swept from the room. What happened afterward she could never recall. Who got Jim for her or whether she got the horse up herself, what was said to her in low, kindly words of warning by the man at Jim’s neck when she sprang into the saddle, who the man was, she could not have told. All she felt at last was that she was free 383 ​and out under the black sky, with the rain beating her burning face and her horse leaping fearfully into the wind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XLII
AT THE DOOR

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

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

No man in Medicine Bend knew Sinclair more thoroughly or feared him less than Barnhardt. No man could better meet him or speak to him with less of hesitation. Sinclair, as he faced Barnhardt, was not easy in spite of his dogged self-control; and he was standing, much to his annoyance, in the glare of an arc-light that swung across the street in front of the shop. He was well aware that no such light had ever swung within a block of the shop before and in it he saw the hand of Whispering Smith. The light was unexpected, Barnhardt was a surprise, and even the falling snow, which protected him from being seen twenty feet away, angered him. He asked curtly who was ill, and without awaiting an answer asked for his wife.

The surgeon eyed him coldly. “Sinclair, what are you doing in Medicine Bend? Have you come to surrender yourself?”

“Surrender myself? Yes, I’m ready any time to surrender myself. Take me along yourself, Barnhardt, if you think I’ve done worse than any ​man would that has been hounded as I’ve been hounded. I want to see my wife.”

“Sinclair, you can’t see your wife.”

“What’s the matter—is she sick?”

“No, but you can’t see her.”

“Who says I can’t see her?”

“I say so.”

Sinclair swept the ice furiously from his beard and his right hand fell to his hip as he stepped back. “You’ve turned against me too, have you, you gray-haired wolf? Can’t see her! Get out of that door.”

The surgeon pointed his finger at the murderer. “No, I won’t get out of this door. Shoot, you coward! Shoot an unarmed man. You will not live to get a hundred feet away. This place is watched for you; you could not have got within a hundred yards of it to-night except for this snow.” Barnhardt pointed through the storm. “Sinclair, you will hang in the court-house square, and I will take the last beat of your pulse with these fingers, and when I pronounce you dead they will cut you down. You want to see your wife. You want to kill her. Don’t lie; you want to kill her. You were heard to say as much to-night at the Dunning ranch. You were watched and tracked, and you are expected and looked for here. Your best friends have gone back on you. ​Ay, curse again and over again, but that will not put Ed Banks on his feet.”

Sinclair stamped with frenzied oaths. “You’re too hard on me,” he cried, clenching his hands. “I say you’re too hard. You’ve heard one side of it. Is that the way you put judgment on a man that’s got no friends left because they start a new lie on him every day? Who is it that’s watching me? Let them stand out like men in the open. If they want me, let them come like men and take me!”

“Sinclair, this storm gives you a chance to get away; take it. Bad as you are, there are men in Medicine Bend who knew you when you were a man. Don’t stay here for some of them to sit on the jury that hangs you. If you can get away, get away. If I were your friend—and God knows whom you can call friend in Medicine Bend to-night—I couldn’t say more. Get away before it is too late.”

He was never again seen alive in Medicine Bend. They tracked him next day over every foot of ground he had covered. They found where he had left his spent horse and where afterward he had got the fresh one. They learned how he had eluded all the picketing planned for precisely such a contingency, got into the Wickiup, got upstairs and burst open the very door of McCloud’s room. ​But Dicksie had on her side that night One greater than her invincible will or her faithful horse. McCloud was two hundred miles away.

Barnhardt lost no time in telephoning the Wickiup that Sinclair was in town, but within an hour, while the two women were still under the surgeon’s protection, a knock at the cottage door gave them a second fright. Barnhardt answered the summons. He opened the door and, as the man outside paused to shake the snow off his hat, the surgeon caught him by the shoulder and dragged into the house Whispering Smith.

Picking the icicles from his hair, Smith listened to all that Barnhardt said, his eyes roving meantime over everything within the room and mentally over many things outside it. He congratulated Barnhardt, and when Marion came into the room he apologized for the snow he had brought in. Dicksie heard his voice and cried out from the bedroom. They could not keep her away, and she ran out to catch his hands and plead with him not to go away. He tried to assure her that the danger was over; that guards were now outside everywhere, and would be until morning. But Dicksie clung to him and would take no refusal.

Whispering Smith looked at her in amazement and in admiration. “You are captain to-night, Miss Dicksie, by Heaven. If you say the word ​I’ll lie here on a rug till morning. But that man will not be back to-night. You are a queen. If I had a mountain girl that would do as much as that for me I would——”

“What would you do?” asked Marion.

“Say good-by to this accursed country forever.”

CHAPTER XLIII
CLOSING IN

IN the morning the sun rose with a mountain smile. The storm had swept the air till the ranges shone blue and the plain sparkled under a cloudless sky. Bob Scott and Wickwire, riding at daybreak, picked up a trail on the Fence River road. A consultation was held at the bridge, and within half an hour Whispering Smith, with unshaken patience, was in the saddle and following it.

With him were Kennedy and Bob Scott. Sinclair had ridden into the lines, and Whispering Smith, with his best two men, meant to put it up to him to ride out. They meant now to get him, with a trail or without, and were putting horseflesh against horseflesh and craft against craft.

At the forks of the Fence they picked up Wickwire, Kennedy taking him on the up road, while Scott with Whispering Smith crossed to the Crawling Stone. When Smith and Scott reached the Frenchman they parted to cover in turn each of the trails by which it is possible to get out of ​the river country toward the Park and Williams Cache.

By four o’clock in the afternoon they had all covered the ground so well that the four were able to make their rendezvous on the big Fence divide, south of Crawling Stone Valley. They then found, to their disappointment, that, widely separated as they had been, both parties were following trails they believed to be good. They shot a steer, tagged it, ate dinner and supper in one, and separated under Whispering Smith’s counsel that both the trails be followed into the next morning—in the belief that one of them would run out or that the two would run together. At noon the next day Scott rode through the hills from the Fence, and Kennedy with Wickwire came through Two Feather Pass from the Frenchman with the report that the game had left their valleys.

Without rest they pushed on. At the foot of the Mission Mountains they picked up the tracks of a party of three horsemen. Twice within ten miles afterward the men they were following crossed the river. Each time their trail, with some little difficulty, was found again. At a little ranch in the Mission foothills, Kennedy and Scott, leaving Wickwire with Whispering Smith, took fresh horses and pushed ahead as far as they could ​ride before dark, but they brought back news. The trail had split again, with one man riding alone to the left, while two had taken the hills to the right, heading for Mission Pass and the Cache. With Gene Johnson and Bob at the mouth of the Cache there was little fear for that outlet. The turn to the left was the unexpected. Over the little fire in the ranch kitchen where they ate supper, the four men were in conference twenty minutes. It was decided that Scott and Kennedy should head for the Mission Pass, while Whispering Smith, with Wickwire to trail with him, should undertake to cut off, somewhere between Fence River and the railroad, the man who had gone south, the man believed to be Sinclair. It was a late moon, and when Scott and Kennedy saddled their horses Whispering Smith and Wickwire were asleep.

With the cowboy, Whispering Smith started at daybreak. No one saw them again for two days. During those two days and nights they were in the saddle almost continuously. For every mile the man ahead of them rode they were forced to ride two miles and often three. Late in the second night they crossed the railroad, and the first word from them came in long despatches sent by Whispering Smith to Medicine Bend and instructions to Kennedy and Scott in the north, which ​were carried by hard riders straight to Deep Creek.

On the morning of the third day Dicksie Dunning, who had gone home from Medicine Bend and who had been telephoning Marion and George McCloud two days for news, was trying to get Medicine Bend again on the telephone when Puss came in to say that a man at the kitchen door wanted to see her.

“Who is it, Puss?”

“I d’no, Miss Dicksie; ’deed, I never seen him b’fore.”

Dicksie walked around on the porch to the kitchen. A dust-covered man sitting on a limp horse threw back the brim of his hat as he touched it, lifted himself stiffly out of the saddle, and dropped to the ground. He laughed at Dicksie’s startled expression. “Don’t you know me?” he asked, putting out his hand. It was Whispering Smith.

He was a fearful sight. Stained from head to foot with alkali, saddle-cramped and bent, his face scratched and stained, he stood with a smiling appeal in his bloodshot eyes.

Dicksie gave a little uncertain cry, clasped her hands, and, with a scream, threw her arms impulsively around his neck. “Oh, I did not know you! What has happened? I am so glad to ​see you! Tell me what has happened. Are you hurt?”

He stammered like a school-boy. “Nothing has happened. What’s this? Don’t cry; nothing at all has happened. I didn’t realize what a tramp I look or I shouldn’t have come. But I was only a mile away and I had heard nothing for four days from Medicine Bend. And how are you? Did your ride make you ill? No? By Heaven, you are a game girl. That was a ride! How are they all? Where’s your cousin? In town, is he? I thought I might get some news if I rode up, and oh, Miss Dicksie—jiminy! some coffee. But I’ve got only two minutes for it all, only two minutes; do you think Puss has any on the stove?”

Dicksie with coaxing and pulling got him into the kitchen, and Puss tumbled over herself to set out coffee and rolls. He showed himself ravenously hungry, and ate with a simple directness that speedily accounted for everything in sight. “You have saved my life. Now I am going, and thank you a thousand times. There, by Heaven, I’ve forgotten Wickwire! He is with me—waiting down in the cottonwoods at the fork. Could Puss put up a lunch I could take to him? He hasn’t had a scrap for twenty-four hours. But, Dicksie, your tramp is a hummer! I’ve tried to ride him down and wear him out and lose him, ​and, by Heaven, he turns up every time and has been of more use to me than two men.”

She put her hand on Whispering Smith’s arm. “I told him if he would stop drinking he could be foreman here next season.” Puss was putting up the lunch. “Why need you hurry away?” persisted Dicksie. “I’ve a thousand things to say.”

He looked at her amiably. “This is really a case of must.”

“Then, tell me, what favor may I do for you?” She looked appealingly into his tired eyes. “I want to do something for you. I must! don’t deny me. Only, what shall it be?”

“Something for me? What can I say? You’ll be kind to Marion—I shouldn’t have to ask that. What can I ask? Stop! there is one thing. I’ve got a poor little devil of an orphan up in the Deep Creek country. Du Sang murdered his father. You are rich and generous, Dicksie; do something for him, will you? Kennedy or Bob Scott will know all about him. Bring him down here, will you, and see he doesn’t go to the dogs? You’re a good girl. What’s this, crying? Now you are frightened. Things are not so bad as that. You want to know everything—I see it in your eyes. Very well, let’s trade. You tell me everything and I’ll tell you everything. Now then: Are you engaged?”

​They were standing under the low porch with the sunshine breaking through the trees. She turned away her face and threw all of her happiness into a laugh. “I won’t tell.”

“Oh, that’s enough. You have told!” declared Whispering Smith. “I knew—why, of course I knew—but I wanted to make you own up. Well, here’s the way things are. Sinclair has run us all over God’s creation for two days to give his pals a chance to break into Williams Cache to get the Tower W money they left with Rebstock. For a fact, we have ridden completely around Sleepy Cat and been down in the Spanish Sinks since I saw you. He doesn’t want to leave without the money, and doesn’t know it is in Kennedy’s hands, and can’t get into the Cache to find out. Now the three—whoever the other two are—and Sinclair—are trying to join forces somewhere up this valley, and Kennedy, Scott, Wickwire, and I are after them; and every outlet is watched, and it must all be over, my dear, before sunset to-night. Isn’t that fine? I mean to have the thing wound up somehow. Don’t look worried.”

“Do not—do not let him kill you,” she cried with a sob.

“He will not kill me; don’t be afraid.”

“I am afraid. Remember what your life is to all of us!”

​“Then, of course, I’ve got to think of what it is to myself—being the only one I’ve got. Sometimes I don’t think much of it; but when I get a welcome like this it sets me up. If I can once get out of this accursed man-slaughtering business, Dicksie— How old are you? Nineteen? Well, you’ve got the finest chap in all these mountains, and George McCloud has the finest——”

With a bubbling laugh she shook her finger at him. “Now you are caught. Say the finest woman in these mountains if you dare! Say the finest woman!”

“The finest woman of nineteen in all creation!” He swung with a laugh into the saddle and waved his hat. She watched him ride down the road and around the hill. When he reappeared she was still looking and he was galloping along the lower road. A man rode out at the fork to meet him and trotted with him over the bridge. Riding leisurely across the creek, their broad hats bobbing unevenly in the sunshine, they spurred swiftly past the grove of quaking asps, and in a moment were lost beyond the trees.

CHAPTER XLIV
CRAWLING STONE WASH

WHERE the Little Crawling Stone River tears out of the Mission Mountains it has left a grayish-white gap that may be seen for many miles. This is the head of the North Crawling Stone Valley. Twenty miles to the right the big river itself bursts through the Mission hills in the canyon known as the Box. Between the confluence of Big and Little Crawling Stone, and on the east side of Little Crawling Stone, lies a vast waste. Standing in the midst of this frightful eruption from the heart of the mountains, one sees, as far as the eye can reach, a landscape utterly forbidding. North for sixty miles lie the high chains of the Mission range, and a cuplike configuration of the mountains close to the valley affords a resting-place for the deepest snows of winter and a precipitous escape for the torrents of June. Here, when the sun reaches its summer height or a sweet-grass wind blows soft or a cloudburst above the peaks strikes the southerly face of the range, winter unfrocks in a single night. A glacier of snow ​melts within twenty-four hours into a torrent of lava and bursts with incredible fury from a thousand gorges.

When this happens nothing withstands. Whatever lies in the path of the flood is swept from the face of the earth. The mountains, assailed in a moment with the ferocity of a hundred storms, are ripped and torn like hills of clay. The frosted scale of the granite, the desperate root of the cedar, the poised nest of the eagle, the clutch of the crannied vine, the split and start of the mountainside, are all as one before the June thaw. At its height Little Crawling Stone, with a head of forty feet, is a choking flood of rock. Mountains, torn and bleeding, vomit bowlders of thirty, sixty, a hundred tons like pebbles upon the valley. Even there they find no permanent resting-place. Each succeeding year sees them torn groaning from their beds in the wash. New masses of rock are hurled upon them, new waters lift them in fresh caprice, and the crash and the grinding echo in the hills like a roar of mountain thunder.

Where the wash covers the valley nothing lives; the fertile earth has long been buried under the mountain débris. It supports no plant life beyond the scantiest deposit of weed-plant seed, and the rocky scurf, spreading like a leprosy over many miles, scars the face of the green earth. This is the ​Crawling Stone wash. Exhausted by the fury of its few yearly weeks of activity, Little Crawling Stone runs for the greater part of the year a winding, shallow stream through a bed of whitened bowlders where lizards sun themselves and trout lurk in shaded pools.

When Whispering Smith and his companions were fairly started on the last day of their ride, it was toward this rift in the Mission range that the trail led them. Sinclair, with consummate cleverness, had rejoined his companions; but the attempt to get into the Cache, and his reckless ride into Medicine Bend, had reduced their chances of escape to a single outlet, and that they must find up Crawling Stone Valley. The necessity of it was spelled in every move the pursued men had made for twenty-four hours. They were riding the pick of mountain horseflesh and covering their tracks by every device known to the high country. Behind them, made prudent by unusual danger, rode the best men the mountain division could muster for the final effort to bring them to account. The fast riding of the early week had given way to the pace of caution. No trail sign was overlooked, no point of concealment directly approached, no hiding-place left unsearched.

The tension of a long day of this work was drawing to a close when the sun set and left the ​big wash in the shadow of the mountains. On the higher ground to the right, Kennedy and Scott were riding where they could command the gullies of the precipitous left bank of the river. High on the left bank itself, worming his way like a snake from point to point of concealment through the scanty brush of the mountainside, crawled Wickwire, commanding the pockets in the right bank. Closer to the river on the right and following the trail itself over shale and rock and between scattered bowlders, Whispering Smith, low on his horse’s neck, rode slowly.

It was almost too dark to catch the slight discolorations where pebbles had been disturbed on a flat surface or the calk of a horseshoe had slipped on the uneven face of a ledge, and he had halted under an uplift to wait for Wickwire on the distant left to advance, when, half a mile below him, a horseman crossing the river rode slowly past a gap in the rocks and disappeared below the next bend. He was followed in a moment by a second rider and a third. Whispering Smith knew he had not been seen. He had flushed the game, and, wheeling his horse, rode straight up the river-bank to high ground, where he could circle around widely below them. They had slipped between his line and Wickwire’s, and were doubling back, following the dry bed of the stream. It was ​impossible to recall Kennedy and Scott without giving an alarm, but by a quick détour he could at least hold the quarry back for twenty minutes with his rifle, and in that time Kennedy and Scott could come up.

Less than half an hour of daylight remained. If the outlaws could slip down the wash and out into the Crawling Stone Valley they had every chance of getting away in the night; and if the third man should be Barney Rebstock, Whispering Smith knew that Sinclair thought only of escape. Smith alone, of their pursuers, could now intercept them, but a second hope remained: on the left, Wickwire was high enough to command every turn in the bed of the river. He might see them and could force them to cover with his rifle even at long range. Casting up the chances, Whispering Smith, riding faster over the uneven ground than anything but sheer recklessness would have prompted, hastened across the waste. His rifle lay in his hand, and he had pushed his horse to a run. A single fearful instinct crowded now upon the long strain of the week. A savage fascination burned like a fever in his veins, and he meant that they should not get away. Taking chances that would have shamed him in cooler moments, he forced his horse at the end of the long ride to within a hundred paces of the river, threw his lines, slipped like ​a lizard from the saddle, and, darting with incredible swiftness from rock to rock, gained the water’s edge.

From up the long shadows of the wash there came the wail of an owl. From it he knew that Wickwire had seen them and was warning him, but he had anticipated the warning and stood below where the hunted men must ride. He strained his eyes over the waste of rock above. For one half-hour of daylight he would have sold, in that moment, ten years of his life. What could he do if they should be able to secrete themselves until dark between him and Wickwire? Gliding under cover of huge rocks up the dry watercourse, he reached a spot where the floods had scooped a long, hollow curve out of a soft ledge in the bank, leaving a stretch of smooth sand on the bed of the stream. At the upper point great bowlders pushed out in the river. He could not inspect the curve from the spot he had gained without reckless exposure, but he must force the little daylight left to him. Climbing completely over the lower point, he advanced cautiously, and from behind a sheltering spur stepped out upon an overhanging table of rock and looked across the river-bottom. Three men had halted on the sand within the curve. Two lay on their rifles under the upper point, a hundred and twenty paces from Whispering Smith. ​The third man, Seagrue, less than fifty yards away, had got off his horse and was laying down his rifle, when the hoot-owl screeched again and he looked uneasily back. They had chosen for their halt a spot easily defended, and needed only darkness to make them safe, when Smith, stepping out into plain sight, threw forward his hand.

They heard his sharp call to pitch up, and the men under the point jumped. Seagrue had not yet taken his hand from his rifle. He threw it to his shoulder. As closely together as two fingers of the right hand can be struck twice in the palm of the left, two rifle-shots cracked across the wash. Two bullets passed so close in flight they might have struck. One cut the dusty hair from Smith’s temple and slit the brim of his hat above his ear; the other struck Seagrue under the left eye, ploughed through the roof of his mouth, and, coming out below his ear, splintered the rock at his back.

The shock alone would have staggered a bullock, but Seagrue, laughing, came forward pumping his gun. Sinclair, at a hundred and twenty yards, cut instantly into the fight, and the ball from his rifle creased the alkali that crusted Whispering Smith’s unshaven cheek. As he fired he sprang to cover.

​For Seagrue and Smith there was no cover: for one or both it was death in the open and Seagrue, with his rifle at his cheek, walked straight into it. Taking for a moment the fire of the three guns, Whispering Smith stood, a perfect target, outlined against the sky. They whipped the dust from his coat, tore the sleeve from his wrist, and ripped the blouse collar from his neck; but he felt no bullet shock. He saw before him only the buckle of Seagrue’s belt forty paces away, and sent bullet after bullet at the gleam of brass between the sights. Both men were using high-pressure guns, and the deadly shock of the slugs made Seagrue twitch and stagger. The man was dying as he walked. Smith’s hand was racing with the lever, and had a cartridge jammed, the steel would have snapped like a match.

It was beyond human endurance to support the leaden death. The little square of brass between the sights wavered. Seagrue stumbled, doubled on his knees, and staggering plunged loosely forward on the sand. Whispering Smith threw his fire toward the bowlder behind which Sinclair and Barney Rebstock had disappeared.

Suddenly he realized that the bullets from the point were not coming his way. He was aware of a second rifle-duel above the bend. Wickwire, worming his way down the stream, had uncovered ​Sinclair and young Rebstock from behind. A yell between the shots rang across the wash, and the cringing figure of a man ran out toward Whispering Smith with his hands high in the air, and pitched headlong on the ground. It was the skulker, Barney Rebstock, driven out by Wickwire’s fire.

The, shooting ceased. Silence fell upon the gloom of the dusk. Then came a calling between Smith and Wickwire, and a signalling of pistol-shots for their companions. Kennedy and Bob Scott dashed down toward the river-bed on their horses. Seagrue lay on his face. Young Rebstock sat with his hands around his knees on the sand. Above him at some distance, Wickwire and Smith stood before a man who leaned against the sharp cheek of the bowlder at the point. In his hands his rifle was held across his lap just as he had dropped on his knee to fire. He had never moved after he was struck. His head, drooping a little, rested against the rock, and his hat lay on the sand; his heavy beard had sunk into his chest and he kneeled in the shadow, asleep. Scott and Kennedy knew him. In the mountains there was no double for Murray Sinclair.

When he jumped behind the point to pick Whispering Smith off the ledge he had laid himself directly under Wickwire’s fire across the wash. ​The first shot of the cowboy at two hundred yards had passed, as he knelt, through both temples.

They laid him at Seagrue’s side. The camp was made beside the dead men in the wash. “You had better not take him to Medicine Bend,” said Whispering Smith, sitting late with Kennedy before the dying fire. “It would only mean that much more unpleasant talk and notoriety for her. The inquest can be held on the Frenchman. Take him to his own ranch and telegraph the folks in Wisconsin—God knows whether they will want to hear. But his mother is there yet. But if half what Barney has told to-night is true it would be better if no one ever heard.”

CHAPTER XLV
BACK TO THE MOUNTAINS

IN the cottage in Boney Street, one year later, two women were waiting. It was ten o’clock at night.

“Isn’t it a shame to be disappointed like this?” complained Dicksie, pushing her hair impatiently back. “Really, poor George is worked to death. He was to be in at six o’clock, Mr. Lee said, and here it is ten, and all your beautiful dinner spoiled. Marion, are you keeping something from me? Look me in the eye. Have you heard from Gordon Smith?”

“No, Dicksie.”

“Not since he left the mountains a year ago?”

“Not since he left the mountains a year ago.”

Dicksie, sitting forward in her chair, bent her eyes upon the fire. “It is so strange. I wonder where he is to-night. How he loves you, Marion! He told me everything when he said good-by. He made me promise not to tell then; but I didn’t promise to keep it forever.”

​Marion smiled. “A year isn’t forever, Dicksie.”

“Well, it’s pretty near forever when you are in love,” declared Dicksie energetically. “I know just how he felt,” she went on in a quieter tone. “He felt that all the disagreeable excitement and talk we had here then bore heaviest on you. He said if he stayed in Medicine Bend the newspapers never would cease talking and people never would stop annoying you—and you know George did say they were asking to have passenger trains held here just so people could see Whispering Smith. And, Marion, think of it, he actually doesn’t know yet that George and I are married! How could we notify him without knowing where he was? And he doesn’t know that trains are running up the Crawling Stone Valley. Mercy! a year goes like an hour when you’re in love, doesn’t it? George said he knew we should hear from him within six months—and George has never yet been mistaken excepting when he said I should grow to like the railroad business—and now it is a year and no news from him.” Dicksie sprang from her chair. “I am going to call up Mr. Rooney Lee and just demand my husband! I think Mr. Lee handles trains shockingly every time George tries to get home like this on Saturday nights—now don’t you? And passenger trains ought to get out of the way, ​anyway, when a division superintendent is trying to get home. What difference does it make to a passenger, I’d like to know, whether he is a few hours less or longer in getting to California or Japan or Manila or Hongkong or Buzzard’s Gulch, provided he is safe—and you know there has not been an accident on the division for a year, Marion. There’s a step now. I’ll bet that’s George!”

The door opened and it was George.

“Oh, honey!” cried Dicksie softly, waving her arms as she stood an instant before she ran to him. “But haven’t I been a-waitin’ for you!”

“Too bad! and, Marion,” he exclaimed, turning without releasing his wife from his arms, “how can I ever make good for all this delay? Oh, yes, I’ve had dinner. Never, for Heaven’s sake, wait dinner for me! But wait, both of you, till you hear the news!”

Dicksie kept her hands on his shoulders. “You have heard from Whispering Smith!”

“I have.”

“I knew it!”

“Wait till I get it straight. Mr. Bucks is here—I came in with him in his car. He has news of Whispering Smith. One of our freight-traffic men in the Puget Sound country, who has been in a hospital in Victoria, learned by the merest ​accident that Gordon Smith was lying in the same hospital with typhoid fever.”

Marion rose swiftly. “Then the time has come, thank God, when I can do something for him; and I am going to him to-night!”

“Fine!” cried McCloud. “So am I, and that is why I’m late.”

“Then I am going, too,” exclaimed Dicksie solemnly.

“Do you mean it?” asked her husband. “Shall we let her, Marion? Mr. Bucks says I am to take his car and take Barnhardt, and keep the car there till I can bring Gordon back. Mr. Bucks and his secretary will ride to-night as far as Bear Dance with us, and in the morning they join Mr. Glover there.” McCloud looked at his watch. “If you are both going, can you be ready by twelve o’clock for the China Mail?”

“We can be ready in an hour,” declared Dicksie, throwing her arm half around Marion’s neck, “can’t we, Marion?”

“I can be ready in thirty minutes.”

“Then, by Heaven—” McCloud studied his watch.

“What is it, George?”

“We won’t wait for the midnight train. We will take an engine, run special to Green River, ​overhaul the Coast Limited, and save a whole day.”

“George, pack your suit-case—quick, dear; and you, too, Marion; suit-cases are all we can take,” cried Dicksie, pushing her husband toward the bedroom. “I’ll telephone Rooney Lee for an engine myself right away. Dear me, it is kind of nice, to be able to order up a train when you want one in a hurry, isn’t it, Marion? Perhaps I shall come to like it if they ever make George a vice-president.”

In half an hour they had joined Bucks in his car, and Bill Dancing was piling the baggage into the vestibule. Bucks was sitting down to coffee. Chairs had been provided at the table, and after the greetings, Bucks, seating Marion Sinclair at his right and Barnhardt and McCloud at his left, asked Dicksie to sit opposite and pour the coffee. “You are a railroad man’s wife now and you must learn to assume responsibility.”

McCloud looked apprehensive. “I am afraid she will be assuming the whole division if you encourage her too much, Mr. Bucks.”

“Marrying a railroad man,” continued Bucks, pursuing his own thought, “is as bad as marrying into the army; if you have your husband half the time you are lucky. Then, too, in the railroad business your husband may have to be set back ​when the traffic falls off. It’s a little light at this moment, too. How should you take it if we had to put him on a freight train for a while, Mrs. McCloud?"

"Oh, Mr. Bucks!"

"Or suppose he should be promoted and should have to go to headquarters—some of us are getting old, you know."

"Really," Dicksie looked most demure as she filled the president’s cup, "really, I often say to Mr. McCloud that I can not believe Mr. Bucks is president of this great road. He always looks to me to be the youngest man on the whole executive staff. Two lumps of sugar, Mr. Bucks?"

The bachelor president rolled his eyes as he reached for his cup. "Thank you, Mrs. McCloud, only one after that." He looked toward Marion. "All I can say is that if Mrs. McCloud’s husband had married her two years earlier he might have been general manager by this time. Nothing could hold a man back, even a man of his modesty, whose wife can say as nice things as that. By the way, Mrs. Sinclair, does this man keep you supplied with transportation?"

"Oh, I have my annual, Mr. Bucks!" Marion opened her bag to find it.

Bucks held out his hand. "Let me see it a moment." He adjusted his eye-glasses, looked at the ​pass, and called for a pen; Bucks had never lost his gracious way of doing very little things. He laid the card on the table and wrote across the back of it over his name: "Good on all passenger trains." When he handed the card back to Marion he turned to Dicksie. "I understand you are laying out two or three towns on the ranch, Mrs. McCloud?"

"Two or three! Oh, no, only one as yet, Mr. Bucks! They are laying out, oh, such a pretty town! Cousin Lance is superintending the street work—and whom do you think I am going to name it after? You! I think ’Bucks’ makes a dandy name for a town, don’t you? And I am going to have one town named Dunning; there will be two stations on the ranch, you know, and I think, really, there ought to be three."

"As many as that?"

"I don’t believe you can operate a line that long, Mr. Bucks, with stations fourteen miles apart." Bucks opened his eyes in benevolent surprise. Dicksie, unabashed, kept right on: "Well, do you know how traffic is increasing over there, with the trains running only two months now? Why, the settlers are fairly pouring into the country."

"Will you give me a corner lot if we put another station on the ranch?"

​“I will give you two if you will give us excursions and run some of the Overland passenger trains through the valley.”

Bucks threw back his head and laughed in his tremendous way. “I don’t know about that; I daren’t promise offhand, Mrs. McCloud. But if you can get Whispering Smith to come back you might lay the matter before him. He is to take charge of all the colonist business when he returns; he promised to do that before he went away for his vacation. Whispering Smith is really the man you will have to stand in with.”

Whispering Smith, lying on his iron bed in the hospital, professed not to be able quite to understand why they had made such a fuss about it. He underwent the excitement of the appearance of Barnhardt and the first talk with McCloud and Dicksie with hardly a rise in his temperature, and, lying in the sunshine of the afternoon, he was waiting for Marion. When she opened the door his face was turned wistfully toward it. He held out his hands with the old smile. She ran half blinded across the room and dropped on her knee beside him.

“My dear Marion, why did they drag you away out here?”

“They did not drag me away out here. Did ​you expect me to sit with folded hands when I heard you were ill anywhere in the wide world?”

He looked hungrily at her. “I didn’t suppose any one in the wide world would take it very seriously.”

“Mr. McCloud is crushed this afternoon to think you have said you would not go back with him. You would not believe how he misses you.”

“It has been pretty lonesome for the last year. I didn’t think it could be so lonesome anywhere.”

“Nor did I.”

“Have you noticed it? I shouldn’t think you could in the mountains. Was there much water last spring? Heavens, I’d like to see the Crawling Stone again!”

“Why don’t you come back?”

He folded her hands in his own. “Marion, it is you. I’ve been afraid I couldn’t stand it to be near you and not tell you——”

“What need you be afraid to tell me?”

“That I have loved you so long.”

Her head sunk close to his. “Don’t you know you have said it to me many times without words? I’ve only been waiting for a chance to tell you how happy it makes me to think it is true.”

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