204
“And here’s to the hearts that it brings us!” exclaimed Dicksie.
“Fine!” cried McCloud. “‘Here’s to the hearts that it brings us!’”
Dicksie threw back her head and laughed with the others. Then Whispering Smith looked grave. “There is a difficulty,” said he, knitting his brows. “You have spoiled my song.”
“Oh, Mr. Smith, I hope not! Have I?”
“Your line is so much better than what I have that it makes my stuff sound cheap.”
“Oh, no, Gordon!” interposed McCloud. “You don’t see that one reason why Miss Dunning’s line sounds better than yours is owing to the differences in your voices. If she will repeat the chorus, finishing with her line, you will see the difference.”
“Miss Dunning, take the note-book,” begged Whispering Smith.
“And rise, of course,” suggested McCloud.
“Oh, the note-book! I shall be afraid to hold it. Where are the verses, Mr. Smith? Is this fine handwriting yours?
Then here’s to the bumper that proves every friend!
Isn’t that true?
And though when we drink it it wrings us,
––and it does sometimes!
205
Here’s to the cup that we drain to the end,
Even women have to be plucky, don’t they, Marion?
And here’s to the hearts that it brings us!”
Whispering Smith rose before the applause subsided. “I ask you to drink this, standing, in condensed milk.”
“Have we enough to stand in?” interposed Dicksie.
“If we stand together in trouble, that ought to be enough,” observed McCloud.
“We’re doing that without rising, aren’t we?” asked Marion. “If we hadn’t been in trouble we shouldn’t have ventured to this camp to-night.”
“And if you had not put me to the trouble of following you––and it was a lot of trouble!––Ishouldn’t have been in camp to-night,” said Whispering Smith.
“And ifIhad not been in trouble this camp wouldn’t have been here to-night,” declared McCloud. “What have we to thank for it all but trouble?”
A voice called the superintendent’s name through the tent door. “Mr. McCloud?”
“And there is more trouble,” added McCloud. “What is it, Bill?”
206
“Twenty-eight and nine tenths on the gauge, sir.”
McCloud looked at his companions. “I told you so. Up three-tenths. Thank you, Bill; I’ll be with you in a minute. Tell Cherry to come and take away the supper things, will you? That is about all the water we shall get to-night, I think. It’s all we want,” added McCloud, glancing at his watch. “I’m going to take a look at the river. We shall be quiet now around here until half-past three, and if you, Marion, and Miss Dunning will take the tent, you can have two hours’ rest before we start. Bill Dancing will guard you against intrusion, and if you want ice-water ring twice.”
207CHAPTER XXIIA TALK WITH WHISPERING SMITH
When Whispering Smith had followed McCloud from the tent, Dicksie turned to Marion and caught her hand. “Is this the terrible man I have heard about?” she murmured. “And I thought him ferocious! But is he as pitiless as they say, Marion?”
Marion laughed––a troubled little laugh of surprise and sadness. “Dear, he isn’t pitiless at all. He has unpleasant things to do, and does them. He is the man on whom the railroad relies to repress the lawlessness that breaks out in the mountains at times and interferes with the operating of the road. It frightens people away, and prevents others from coming in to settle. Railroads want law and order. Robbery and murders don’t make business for railroads. They depend on settlers for developing a country, don’t you know; otherwise they would have no traffic, not to speak of wanting their trains and men let alone. When Mr. Bucks undertook to open up this country to settlers, he needed a man of patience and208endurance and with courage and skill in dealing with lawless men, and no man has ever succeeded so well as this terrible man you have heard about. He is terrible, my dear, to lawless men, not to any one else. He is terrible in resource and in daring, but not in anything else I know of, and I knew him when he was a boy and wore a big pink worsted scarf when he went skating.”
“I should like to have seen that scarf,” said Dicksie reflectively. She rose and looked around the tent. In a few minutes she made Marion lie down on one of the cots. Then she walked to the front of the tent, opened the flap, and looked out.
Whispering Smith was sitting before the fire. Rain was falling, but Dicksie put on her close-fitting black coat, raised the door-flap, and walked noiselessly from the tent and up behind him. “Alone in the rain?” she asked.
She had expected to see him start at her voice, but he did not, though he rose and turned around. “Not now,” he answered as he offered her his box with a smile.
“Are you taking your hat off for me in the rain? Put it on again!” she insisted with a little tone of command, and she was conscious of gratification when he obeyed amiably.
“I won’t take your box unless you can find another!” she said. “Oh, you have another! I209came out to tell you what a dreadful man I thought you were, and to apologize.”
“Never mind apologizing. Lots of people think worse than that of me and don’t apologize. I’m sorry I have no shelter to offer you, except to sit on this side and take the rain.”
“Why should you take the rain for me?”
“You are a woman.”
“But a stranger to you.”
“Only in a way.”
Dicksie gazed for a moment at the fire. “You won’t think me abrupt, will you?” she said, turning to him, “but, as truly as I live, I cannot account for you, Mr. Smith. I guess at the ranch we don’t know what goes on in the world. Everything I see of you contradicts everything I have heard of you.”
“You haven’t seen much of me yet, you know, and you may have heard much better accounts of me than I deserve. Still, it isn’t surprising you can’t account for me; in fact, it would be surprising if you could. Nobody pretends to do that. You must not be shocked if I can’t even account for myself. Do you know what a derelict is? A ship that has been abandoned but never wholly sinks.”
“Please don’t make fun of me! How did you happen to come into the mountains? I do want to understand things better.”
210
“Why, you are in real earnest, aren’t you? But I am not making fun of you. Do you know President Bucks? No? Too bad! He’s a very handsome old bachelor. And he is one of those men who get all sorts of men to do all sorts of things for them. You know, building and operating railroads in this part of the country is no joke. The mountains are filled with men that don’t care for God, man, or the devil. Sometimes they furnish their own ammunition to fight with and don’t bother the railroad for years; at such times the railroad leaves them alone. For my part, I never quarrel with a man that doesn’t quarrel with the road. Then comes a time when they get after us, shooting our men or robbing our agents or stopping our trains. Of course we have to get busy then. A few years ago they worried Bucks till they nearly turned his hair gray. At that unfortunate time I happened into his office with a letter of introduction from his closest Chicago friend, Willis Howard, prince of good men, the man that made the Palmer House famous––yes. Now I had come out here, Miss Dunning––I almost said Miss Dicksie, because I hear it so much–––”
“I should be greatly set up to hear you call me Dicksie. And I have wondered a thousand times about your name. Dare I ask––whydo211they call you Whispering Smith? You don’t whisper.”
He laughed with abundance of good-humor. “That is a ridiculous accident, and it all came about when I lived in Chicago. Do you know anything about the infernal climate there? Well, in Chicago I used to lose my voice whenever I caught a cold––sometimes for weeks together. So they began calling me Whispering Smith, and I’ve never been able to shake the name. Odd, isn’t it? But I came out to go into the real-estate business. I was looking for some gold-bearing farm lands where I could raise quartz, don’t you know, and such things––yes. I don’t mind telling you this, though I wouldn’t tell it to everybody–––”
“Certainly not,” assented Dicksie, drawing her skirt around to sit in closer confidence.
“I wanted to get rich quick,” murmured Whispering Smith, confidentially.
“Almost criminal, wasn’t it?”
“I wanted to have evening clothes.”
“Yes.”
“And for once in my life two pairs of suspenders––a modest ambition, but a gnawing one. Would you believe it? Before I left Bucks’s office he had hired me for a railroad man. When he asked me what I could do, and I admitted a little experience in handling real estate, he brought his212fist down on the table and swore I should be his right-of-way man.”
“How about the mining?”
Whispering Smith waved his hand in something of the proud manner in which Bucks could wave his presidential hand. “My business, Bucks said, need not interfere with that, not in the least; he said that I could do all the mining I wanted to, and Ihavedone all the mining I wanted to. But here is the singular thing that happened: I opened up my office and had nothing to do; they didn’t seem to want any right of way just then. I kept getting my check every month, and wasn’t doing a hand’s turn but riding over the country and shooting jack-rabbits. But, Lord, I love this country! Did you know I used to be a cowboy in the mountains years ago? Indeed I did. I know it almost as well as you do. I mined more or less in the meantime. Occasionally I would go to Bucks––you say you don’t know him?––too bad!––and tell him candidly I wasn’t doing a thing to earn my salary. At such times he would only ask me how I liked the job,” and Whispering Smith’s heavy eyebrows rose in mild surprise at the recollection. “One day when I was talking with him he handed me a telegram from the desert saying that a night operator at a lonely station had been shot and a switch misplaced and a train nearly wrecked. He asked me213what I thought of it. I discovered that the poor fellow had shot himself, and in the end we had to put him in the insane asylum to save him from the penitentiary––but that was where my trouble began.
“It ended in my having to organize the special service on the whole road to look after a thousand and one things that nobody else had––well, let us say time or inclination to look after: fraud and theft and violence and all that sort of disagreeable thing. Then one day the cat crawled out of the bag. What do you think? That man who is now president of this road had somewhere seen a highly colored story about me in a magazine, a ten-cent magazine, you know. He had spotted me the first time I walked into his office, and told me a long time afterward it was just like seeing a man walk out of a book, and that he had hard work to keep from falling on my neck. He knew what he wanted me for; it was just this thing. I left Chicago to get away from it, and this is the result. It is not all that kind of thing, oh, no! When they want to cross a reservation I have a winter in Washington with our attorneys and dine with old friends in the White House, and the next winter I may be on snowshoes chasing a band of rustlers. I swore long ago I would do no more of it––that I couldn’t and wouldn’t. But it is Bucks. I can’t go back214on him. He is amiable and I am soft. He says he is going to have a crown and harp for me some day, but I fancy––that is, I have an intimation––that there will be a red-hot protest at the bar of Heaven,” he lowered his tone, “from a certain unmentionable quarter when I undertake to put the vestments on. By the way, I hear you are interested in chickens. Oh, yes, I’ve heard a lot about you! Bob Johnson, over at Oroville, has some pretty bantams I want to tell you about.”
Whether he talked railroad or chickens, it was all one: Dicksie sat spellbound; and when he announced it was half-past three o’clock and time to rouse Marion, she was amazed.
SCENE FROM THE PHOTO-PLAY PRODUCTION OF “WHISPERING SMITH.” ©American Mutual Studio.
SCENE FROM THE PHOTO-PLAY PRODUCTION OF “WHISPERING SMITH.” ©American Mutual Studio.
215
Dawn showed in the east. The men eating breakfast in tents were to be sent on a work-train up a piece of Y-track that led as near as they could be taken to where they were needed. The train had pulled out when Dicksie, Marion, McCloud, and Whispering Smith took horses to get across to the hills and through to the ranch-house. They had ridden slowly for some distance when McCloud was called back. The party returned and rode together into the mists that hung below the bridge. They came out upon a little party of men standing with lanterns on a piece of track where the river had taken the entire grade and raced furiously through the gap. Fog shrouded the light of the lanterns and lent gloom to the silence, but the women could see the group that McCloud had joined. Standing above his companions on a pile of ties, a tall young man holding a megaphone waited. Out of the darkness there came presently a loud calling. The tall young man at intervals bawled vigorously into the fog in answer. Far away could be heard, in the intervals of silence, the faint clang of the work-train engine-bell. Again the voice came out of the fog. McCloud took the megaphone and called repeatedly. Two men rowed a boat out of the back-water behind the grade, and when McCloud stepped into it, it was released on a line while the oarsmen guided it across the flood until it disappeared. The two megaphone voices could still be heard. After a time the boat was pulled back again, and McCloud stepped out of it. He spoke a moment with the men, rejoined his party, and climbed into the saddle. “Now we are off,” said he.
“What was it all about?” asked Whispering Smith.
“Your friend Klein is over there. Nobody could understand what he said except that he wanted me. When I got here I couldn’t make out what he was talking about, so they let us out in the boat on a line. Half-way across the break I made out what was troubling him. He said he216was going to lose three hundred feet of track, and wanted to know what to do.”
“And you told him, of course?”
“Yes.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him to lose it.”
“I could have done that myself.”
“Why didn’t you?”
217CHAPTER XXIIIAT THE RIVER
They found the ranch-house as Marion and Dicksie had left it, deserted. Puss told them every one was at the river. McCloud did not approve Dicksie’s plan of going down to see her cousin first. “Why not let me ride down and manage it without bringing you into it at all?” he suggested. “It can be done.” And after further discussion it was so arranged.
McCloud and Smith had been joined by Dancing on horseback, and they made their way around Squaw Lake and across the fields. The fog was rolling up from the willows at the bend. Men were chopping in the brush, and McCloud and his companion soon met Lance Dunning riding up the narrow strip of sand that held the river off the ranch.
McCloud greeted Dunning, regardless of his amazement, as if he had parted from him the day before. “How are you making it over here?” he asked. “We are in pretty good shape at the moment down below, and I thought I would ride over to see if we could do anything for you. This218is what you call pretty fair water for this part of the valley, isn’t it?”
Lance swallowed his astonishment. “This isn’t water, McCloud; this is hell.” He took off his hat and wiped his forehead. “Well, I call this white, anyway, and no mistake––I do indeed, sir! This is Whispering Smith, isn’t it? Glad to see you at Crawling Stone, sir.” Which served not only to surprise but to please Whispering Smith.
“Some of my men were free,” continued McCloud; “I switched some mattresses and sacks around the Y, thinking they might come in play here for you at the bend. They are at your service if you think you need them.”
“Need them!” Lance swore fiercely and from the bottom of his heart. He was glad to get help from any quarter and made no bones about it. Moreover, McCloud lessened the embarrassment by explaining that he had a personal interest in holding the channel where it ran, lest a change above might threaten the approaches already built to the bridge; and Whispering Smith, who would have been on terms with the catfish if he had been flung into the middle of the Crawling Stone, contributed at once, like a reënforced spring, to the ease of the situation.
Lance again took off his hat and wiped the sweat of anxiety from his dripping forehead. “Whatever219differences of opinion I may have with your damned company, I have no lack of esteem personally, McCloud, for you, sir, by Heaven! How many men did you bring?”
“And whatever wheels you Crawling Stone ranchers may have in your heads on the subject of irrigation,” returned McCloud evenly, “I have no lack of esteem personally, Mr. Dunning, for you. I brought a hundred.”
“Do you want to take charge here? I’m frank, sir; you understand this game and I don’t.”
“Suppose we look the situation over; meantime, all our supplies have to be brought across from the Y. What should you think, Mr. Dunning, of putting all the teams you can at that end of the work?”
“Every man that can be spared from the river shall go at it. Come over here and look at our work and judge for yourself.”
They rode to where the forces assembled by Lance were throwing up embankments and riprapping. There was hurried running to and fro, a violent dragging about of willows, and a good deal of shouting.
Dunning, with some excitement, watched McCloud’s face to note the effect of the activity on him, but McCloud’s expression, naturally reserved, reflected nothing of his views on the subject. Dunning220waved his hand at the lively scene. “They’ve been at it all night. How many would you take away, sir?”
“You might take them all away, as far as the river is concerned,” said McCloud after a moment.
“What? Hell! All?”
“They are not doing anything, are they, but running around in a circle? And those fellows over there might as well be making mud pies as riprapping at that point. What we need there is a mattress and sandbags––and plenty of them. Bill,” directed McCloud in an even tone of business as he turned to Dancing, “see how quick you can get your gangs over here with what sacks they can carry and walk fast. If you will put your men on horses, Mr. Dunning, they can help like everything. That bank won’t last a great while the way the river is getting under it now.” Dancing wheeled like an elephant on his bronco and clattered away through the mud. Lance Dunning, recovering from his surprise, started his men back for the wagons, and McCloud, dismounting, walked with him to the water’s edge to plan the fight for what was left of the strip in front of the alfalfa fields.
When Whispering Smith got back to the house he was in good-humor. He joined Dicksie and Marion in the dining-room, where they were drinking221coffee. Afterward Dicksie ordered horses saddled and the three rode to the river. Up and down the bank as far as they could see in the misty rain, men were moving slowly about––more men, it seemed to Dicksie, than she had ever seen together in her life. The confusion and the noise had disappeared. No one appeared to hurry, but every one had something to do, and, from the gangs who with sledges were sinking “dead-men” among the trees to hold the cables of the mattress that was about to be sunk, and the Japs who were diligently preparing to float and load it, to the men that were filling and wheeling the sandbags, no one appeared excited. McCloud joined the visitors for a few moments and then went back to where Dancing and his men on life-lines were guiding the mattress to its resting-place. In spite of the gloom of the rain, which Whispering Smith said was breaking, Dicksie rode back to the house in much better spirits with her two guests; and when they came from luncheon the sun, as Smith had predicted, was shining.
“Oh, come out!” cried Dicksie, at the door. Marion had a letter to write and went upstairs, but Whispering Smith followed Dicksie. “Does everything you say come true?” she demanded as she stood in the sunshine.
She was demure with light-heartedness and he222looked at her approvingly. “I hope nothing I may say ever will come true unless it makes you happy,” he answered lightly. “It would be a shame if it did anything else.”
She pointed two accusing fingers at him. “Do you know what you promised last night? You have forgotten already! You said you would tell me why my leghorns are eating their feathers off.”
“Let me talk with them.”
“Just what I should like. Come on!” said Dicksie, leading the way to the chicken-yard. “I want you to see my bantams too. I have three of the dearest little things. One is setting. They are over the way. Come see them first. And, oh, you must see my new game chickens. Truly, you never saw anything as handsome as Cæsar––he’s the rooster; and I have six pullets. Cæsar is perfectly superb.”
When the two reached the chicken-houses Dicksie examined the nest where she was setting the bantam hen. “This miserable hen will not set,” she exclaimed in despair. “See here, Mr. Smith, she has left her nest again and is scratching around on the ground. Isn’t it a shame? I’ve tied a cord around her leg so she couldn’t run away, and she is hobbling around like a scrub pony.”
“Perhaps the eggs are too warm,” suggested her companion. “I have had great success in cases like this with powdered ice––not using too223much, of course; just shave the ice gently and rub it over the eggs one at a time; it will often result in refreshing the attention of the hen.”
Dicksie looked grave. “Aren’t you ashamed to make fun of me?”
Whispering Smith seemed taken aback. “Is it really serious business?”
“Of course.”
“Very good. Let me watch this hen for a few minutes and diagnose her. You go on to your other chickens. I’ll stay here and think.”
Dicksie went down through the yards. When she came back, Whispering Smith was sitting on a cracker-box watching the bantam. The chicken was making desperate efforts to get off Dicksie’s cord and join its companions in the runway. Smith was eying the bantam critically when Dicksie rejoined him. “Do you usually,” he asked, looking suddenly up, “have success in setting roosters?”
“Now you are having fun with me again.”
“No, by Heaven! I am not.”
“Have you diagnosed the case?”
“I have, and I have diagnosed it as a case of mistaken identity.”
“Identity?”
“And misapplied energy. Miss Dicksie, you have tied up the wrong bird. This is not a bantam224hen at all; this is a bantam rooster. Now that ismyjudgment. Compare him with the others. Notice how much darker his plumage is––it’s the rooster,” declared Whispering Smith, wiping the perplexity from his brow. “Don’t feel bad, not at all. Cut him loose, Miss Dicksie––don’t hesitate; do it on my responsibility. Now let’s look at the cannibal leghorns––and great Cæsar.”
225CHAPTER XXIVBETWEEN GIRLHOOD AND WOMANHOOD
About nine o’clock that night Puss ushered McCloud in from the river. Dicksie came running downstairs to meet him. “Your cousin insisted I should come up to the house for some supper,” said McCloud dryly. “I could have taken camp fare with the men. Gordon stayed there with him.”
Dicksie held his hat in her hand, and her eyes were bright in the firelight. Puss must have thought the two made a handsome couple, for she lingered, as she started for the kitchen, to look back.
“Puss,” exclaimed her mistress, “fry a chicken right away! A big one, Puss! Mr. McCloud is very hungry, I know. And be quick, do! Oh, how is the river, Mr. McCloud?”
“Behaving like a lamb. It hasn’t fallen much, but the pressure seems to be off the bank, if you know what that means?”
“You must be a magician! Things changed the minute you came!”
226
“The last doctor usually gets credit for the cure, you know.”
“Oh, I know all about that. Don’t you want to freshen up? Should you mind coming right to my room? Marion is in hers,” explained Dicksie, “and I am never sure of Cousin Lance’s,––he has so many boots.”
When she had disposed of McCloud she flew to the kitchen. Puss was starting after a chicken. “Take a lantern, Puss!” whispered Dicksie vehemently.
“No, indeed; dis nigger don’ need no lantern fo’ chickens, Miss Dicksie.”
“But get a good one, Puss, and make haste, do! Mr. McCloud must be starved! Where is the baking powder? I’ll get the biscuits started.”
Puss turned fiercely. “Now look-a heah, yo’ can’t make biscuits! Yo’ jes’ go se’ down wif dat young gen’m’n! Jes’ lemme lone, ef yo’ please! Dis ain’t de firs’ time I killed chickens, Miss Dicksie, an’ made biscuits. Jes’ clair out an’ se’ down! Place f’r young ladies is in de parlor! Ol’ Puss can cook supper f’r one man yet––ef shehasto!”
“Oh, yes, Puss, certainly, I know, of course; only, get a nice chicken!” and with the parting admonition Dicksie, smoothing her hair wildly, hastened back to the living-room.
But the harm was done. Puss, more excited227than her mistress, lost her head when she got to the chicken-yard, and with sufficiently bad results. When Dicksie ran out a few moments afterward for a glass of water for McCloud, Puss was calmly wiping her hands, and in the sink lay the quivering form of young Cæsar. Dicksie caught her favorite up by the legs and suppressed a cry. There could be no mistake. She cast a burning look on Puss. It would do no good to storm now. Dicksie only wrung her hands and returned to McCloud.
He rose in the happiest mood. He could not see what a torment Dicksie was in, and took the water without asking himself why it trembled in her hand. Her restrained manner did not worry him, for he felt that his fight at the river was won, and the prospect of fried chicken composed him. Even the long hour before Puss, calm and inviting in a white cap and apron, appeared to announce supper, passed like a dream. When Dicksie rose to lead the way to the dining-room, McCloud walked on air; the high color about her eyes intoxicated him. Not till half the fried chicken, with many compliments from McCloud, had disappeared, and the plate had gone out for the second dozen biscuits, did he notice Dicksie’s abstraction.
“I’m sure you need worry no longer about the228water,” he observed reassuringly. “I think the worst of the danger is past.”
Dicksie looked at the table-cloth with wide-open eyes. “I feel sure that it is. I am no longer worrying about that.”
“It’s nothing I can do or leave undone, is it?” asked McCloud, laughing a little as he implied in his tone that she must be worrying about something.
Dicksie made a gesture of alarm. “Oh, no, no; nothing!”
“It’s a pretty good plan not to worry about anything.”
“Do you think so?”
“Why, we all thought so last night. Heavens!” McCloud drew back in his chair. “I never offered you a piece of chicken! What have I been thinking of?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t eat it anyway!” cried Dicksie.
“You wouldn’t? It is delicious. Do have a plate and a wing at least.”
“Really, I could not bear to think of it,” she said pathetically.
He spoke lower. “Something is troubling you. I have no right to a confidence, I know,” he added, taking a biscuit.
Her eyes fell to the floor. “It is nothing. Pray, don’t mind me. May I fill your cup?” she asked, looking up. “I am afraid I worry too much over229what has happened and can’t be helped. Do you never do that?”
McCloud, laughing wretchedly, tore Cæsar’s last leg from his body. “No indeed. I never worry over what can’t be helped.”
They left the dining-room. Marion came down. But they had hardly seated themselves before the living-room fire when a messenger arrived with word that McCloud was wanted at the river. His chagrin at being dragged away was so apparent that Marion and Dicksie sympathized with him and laughed at him. “‘I never worry about what can’t be helped,’” Dicksie murmured.
He looked at Marion. “That’s a shot at me. You don’t want to go down, do you?” he asked ironically, looking from one to the other.
“Why, of course I’ll go down,” responded Dicksie promptly. “Marion caught cold last night, I guess, so you will excuse her, I know. I will be back in an hour, Marion, and you can toast your cold while I’m gone.”
“But you mustn’t go alone!” protested McCloud.
Dicksie lifted her chin the least bit. “I shall be going with you, shall I not? And if the messenger has gone back I shall have to guide you. You never could find your way alone.”
“But I can go,” interposed Marion, rising.
230
“Not at all; you cannotgo!” announced Dicksie. “I can protect both Mr. McCloud and myself. If he should arrive down there under the wing of two women he would never hear the last of it. I am mistress here still, I think; and I sha’n’t be leaving home, you know, to make the trip!”
McCloud looked at Marion. “I never worry over what can’t be helped––though it is dollars to cents that those fellows don’t need me down there any more than a cat needs two tails. And how will you get back?” he asked, turning to Dicksie.
“I will ride back!” returned Dicksie loftily. “But you may, if you like, help me get my horse up.”
“Are you sure you can find your way back?” persisted McCloud.
Dicksie looked at him in surprise. “Find my way back?” she echoed softly. “I could not lose it. I can ride over any part of this country at noon or at midnight, asleep or awake, with a saddle or without, with a bridle or without, with a trail or without. I’ve ridden every horse that has ever come on the Crawling Stone Ranch. I could ride when I was three years old. Find my way back?”
The messenger had gone when the two rode from the house. The sky was heavily overcast,231and the wind blew such a gale from the south and west that one could hardly hear what the other said. McCloud could not have ridden from the house to the barn in the utter darkness, but his horse followed Dicksie’s. She halted frequently on the trail for him to come up with her, and after they had crossed the alfalfa fields McCloud did not care whether they ever found the path again or not. “It’s great, isn’t it?” he exclaimed, coming up to her after opening a gate in the dark. “Where are you?”
“This way,” laughed Dicksie. “Look out for the trail here. Give me your hand and let your horse have his head. If he slips, drop off quick on this side.” McCloud caught her hand. They rode for a moment in silence, the horses stepping cautiously. “All right now,” said Dicksie; “you may let go.” But McCloud kept his horse up close and clung to the warm hand. “The camp is just around the hill,” murmured Dicksie, trying to pull away. “But of course if you would like to ride in holding my hand you may!”
“No,” said McCloud, “of course not––not for worlds! But, Miss Dicksie, couldn’t we ride back to the house and ride around the other way into camp? I think the other way into the camp––say, around by the railroad bridge––would be prettier, don’t you?”
232
For answer she touched Jim lightly with her lines and his spring released her hand very effectively. As she did so the trail turned, and the camp-fire, whipped in the high wind, blazed before them.
Whispering Smith and Lance Dunning were sitting together as the two galloped up. Smith helped Dicksie to alight. She was conscious of her color and that her eyes were now unduly bright. Moreover, Whispering Smith’s glance rested so calmly on both McCloud’s face and her own that Dicksie felt as if he saw quite through her and knew everything that had happened since they left the house.
Lance was talking to McCloud. “Don’t abuse the wind,” McCloud was saying. “It’s our best friend to-night, Mr. Dunning. It is blowing the water off-shore. Where is the trouble?” For answer Dunning led McCloud off toward the Bend, and Dicksie was left alone with Whispering Smith.
He made a seat for her on the windward side of the big fire. When she had seated herself she looked up in great contentment to ask if he was not going to sit down beside her. The brown coat, the high black hat, and the big eyes of Whispering Smith had already become a part of her mental store. She saw that he seemed preoccupied,233and sought to draw him out of his abstraction.
“I am so glad you and Mr. McCloud are getting acquainted with Cousin Lance,” she said. “And do you mind my giving you a confidence, Mr. Smith? Lance has been so unreasonable about this matter of the railroad’s coming up the valley and powwowing so much with lawyers and ranchers that he has been forgetting about everything at home. He is so much older than I am that he ought to be the sensible one of the family, don’t you think so? It frightens me to have him losing at cards and drinking. I am afraid he will get into some shooting affair. I don’t understand what has come over him, and I worry about it. I believe you could influence him if you knew him.”
“What makes you think that?” asked Whispering Smith, but his eyes were on the fire.
“Because these men he spends his time with in town––the men who fight and shoot so much––are afraid of you. Don’t laugh at me. I know it is quite true in spite of their talk. I was afraid of you myself until–––”
“Until we made verse together.”
“Until you made verse and I spoiled it. But I think it is because I don’t understand things that I am so afraid. I am not naturally a coward.234I’m sure I could not be afraid of you if I understood things better. And there is Marion. She puzzles me. She will never speak of her husband––I don’t know why. And I don’t know why Mr. McCloud is so hard on Mr. Sinclair––Mr. Sinclair seems so kind and good-natured.”
Whispering Smith looked from the fire into Dicksie’s eyes. “What should you say if I gave you a confidence?”
She opened her heart to his searching gaze. “Would you trust me with a confidence?”
He answered without hesitation. “You shall see. Now, I have many things I can’t talk about, you understand. But if I had to give you a secret this instant that carried my life, I shouldn’t fear to do it––so much for trusting you. Only this, too, as to what I say: don’t ever quote me or let it appear that you any more than know me. Can you manage that? Really? Very good; you will understand why in a minute. The man that is stirring up all this trouble with your Cousin Lance and in this whole country is your kind and good-natured neighbor, Mr. Sinclair. I am prejudiced against him; let us admit that on the start, and remember it in estimating what I say. But Sinclair is the man who has turned your cousin’s head, as well as made things in other ways unpleasant for several of us. Sinclair––I tell you so you will235understand everything, more than your cousin, Mr. McCloud, or Marion Sinclair understand––Sinclair is a train-wrecker and a murderer. That makes you breathe hard, doesn’t it? but it is so. Sinclair is fairly educated and highly intelligent, capable in every way, daring to the limit, and, in a way, fascinating; it is no wonder he has a following. But his following is divided into two classes: the men that know all the secrets, and the men that don’t––men like Rebstock and Du Sang, and men like your cousin and a hundred or so sports in Medicine Bend, who see only the glamour of Sinclair’s pace. Your cousin sympathizes with Sinclair when he doesn’t actually side with him. All this has helped to turn Sinclair’s head, and this is exactly the situation you and McCloud and I and a lot of others are up against. They don’t know all this, but I know it, and now you know it. Let me tell you something that comes close to home. You have a cowboy on the ranch named Karg––he is called Flat Nose. Karg was a railroad man. He is a cattle-thief, a train-robber, a murderer, and a spy. I should not tell you this if you were not game to the last drop of your blood. But I think I know you better than you know yourself, though you never saw me until last night. Karg is Sinclair’s spy at your ranch, and you must never feel it or know it; but he is236there to keep your cousin’s sympathy with Sinclair, and to lure your cousin his way. And Karg will try to kill George McCloud every time he sets foot on this ranch, remember that.”
“Then Mr. McCloud ought not to be here. I don’t want him to stay if he is in danger!” exclaimed Dicksie.
“But I do want him to come here as if it mattered nothing, and I shall try to take care of him. I have a man among your own men, a cowboy named Wickwire, who will be watching Karg, and who is just as quick, and Karg, not knowing he was watched, would be taken unawares. If Wickwire goes elsewhere to work some one else will take his place here. Karg is not on the ranch now; he is up North, hunting up some of your steers that were run off last month by his own cronies. Now do you think I am giving you confidence?”
She looked at him steadily. “If I can only deserve it all.” In the distance she heard the calling of the men at the river borne on the wind. The shock of what had been told her, the strangeness of the night and of the scene, left her calm. Fear had given way to responsibility and Dicksie seemed to know herself.
“You have nothing whatever to do to deserve it but keep your own counsel. But listen a moment longer––for this is what I have been leading up237to,” he said. “Marion will get a message to-morrow, a message from Sinclair, asking her to come to see him at his ranch-house before she goes back. I don’t know what he wants––but she is his wife. He has treated her infamously; that is why she will not live with him and does not speak of him. But you know how strange a woman is––or perhaps you don’t: she doesn’t always cease to care for a man when she ceases to trust him. I am not in Marion’s confidence, Miss Dicksie. She is another man’s wife. I cannot tell how she feels toward him; I know she has often tried to reclaim him from his deviltry. She may try again, that is, she may, for one reason or another, go to him as he asks. I could not interfere, if I would. I have no right to if I could, and I will not. Now this is what I’m trying to get up the courage to ask you. Should you dare to go with her to Sinclair’s ranch if she decides to go to him?”
“Certainly I should dare.”
“After all you know?”
“After all I know––why not?”
“Then in case she does go and you go with her, you will know nothing whatever about anything, of course, unless you get the story from her. What I fear is that which possibly may come of their interview. He may try to kill her––don’t be frightened. He will not succeed if you can only make238sure he doesn’t lead her away on horseback from the ranch-house or get her alone in a room. She has few friends. I respect and honor her because she and I grew up as children together in the same little town in Wisconsin. I know her folks, all of them, and I’ve promised them––you know––to have a kind of care of her.”
“I think I know.”
He looked self-conscious even at her tone of understanding. “I need not try to deceive you; your instinct would be poor if it did not tell you more than I ought to. He came along and turned her head. You need fear nothing for yourself in going with her, and nothing for her if you can cover just those two points––can you remember? Not to let her go away with him on horseback, and not to leave her where she will be alone with him in the house?”
“I can and will. I think as much of Marion as you do. I am proud to be able to do something for you. How little I have known you! I thought you were everything I didn’t want to know.”
“It’s nothing,” he returned easily, “except that Sinclair has stirred up your cousin and the ranchers as well as the Williams Cache gang, and that makes talk about me. I have to do what I can to make this a peaceable country to live in. The239railroad wants decent people here and doesn’t want the other kind, and it falls on me, unfortunately, to keep the other kind moving. I don’t like it, but we can none of us do quite what we please in making a living. Let me tell you this”––he turned to fix his eyes seriously on hers: “Believe anything you hear of me except that I have ever taken human life willingly or save in discharge of my duty. But this kind of work makes my own life an uncertainty, as you can see. I do almost literally carry my life in my hand, for if my hand is not quicker every time than a man’s eye, I am done for then and there.”
“It is dreadful to think of.”
“Not exactly that, but it is something I can’t afford to forget.”
“What would become of the lives of the friends you protect if you were killed?”
“You say you care for Marion Sinclair. I should like to think if anything should happen to me you wouldn’t forget her?”
“I never will.”
He smiled. “Then I put her in charge of the man closest to me, George McCloud, and the woman she thinks the most of in the world––except her mother. What is this, are they back? Yonder they come.”
“We found nothing serious,” McCloud said,240answering their questions as he approached with Lance Dunning. “The current is really swinging away, but the bank is caving in where it was undermined last night.” He stopped before Dicksie. “I am trying to get your cousin to go to the house and go to bed. I am going to stay all night, but there is no necessity for his staying.”
“Damn it, McCloud, it’s not right,” protested Lance, taking off his hat and wiping his forehead. “You need the sleep more than I do. I say he is the one to go to bed to-night,” continued Lance, putting it up to Whispering Smith. “And I insist, by the Almighty, that you two take him back to the house with you now!”
Whispering Smith raised his hand. “If this is merely a family quarrel about who shall go to bed, let us compromise. You two stay up all night and let me go to bed.”
Lance, however, was obdurate.
“It seems to be a family characteristic of the Dunnings to have their own way,” ventured McCloud, after some further dispute. “If you will have it so, Mr. Dunning, you may stand watch to-night and I will go to the house.”
Riding back with McCloud, Dicksie and Whispering Smith discussed the flood. McCloud disclaimed credit for the improvement in the situation. “If the current had held against us as it did yesterday,241nothing I could have done would have turned it,” he said.
“Honesty is the best policy, of course,” observed Whispering Smith. “I like to see a modest man––and you want to remind him of all this when he sends in his bill,” he suggested, speaking to Dicksie in the dark. “But,” he added, turning to McCloud, “admitting that you are right, don’t take the trouble to advertise your view of it around here. It would be only decent strategy for us in the valley just now to take a little of the credit due to the wind.”