389CHAPTER XLIIAT 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 she390dreamed, 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 any391man 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.392Ay, 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.393But 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 word394I’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.”
395CHAPTER XLIIICLOSING 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 of396the 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 could397ride 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, which398were 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 to399see 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,400and, 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?”
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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.”
“Iamafraid. Remember what your life is to all of us!”
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“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. “Nowyou 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.
403CHAPTER XLIVCRAWLING 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 snow404melts 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 mountaindébris. 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 the405Crawling 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 the406big 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 impossible407to recall Kennedy and Scott without giving an alarm, but by a quickdétourhe 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 like408a 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.409The 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.
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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 uncovered411Sinclair 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.412The 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.”
413CHAPTER XLVBACK 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.”
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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 heknewwe 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,415anyway, 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 merest416accident 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,417overhaul 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 Ishallcome 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 back418when 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 the419pass, 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, thereoughtto 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?"420
“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. Did421you 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 itcouldbe 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.”
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