Whispering Smith

by Spearman, Frank H

  He was laughing. Dicksie asked herself if this could be the man about whom floated so many accusations of coldness and cruelty and death. He drew a note-book from a waistcoat pocket.

  “Oh, it’s in the note-book! There comes the black note-book,” exclaimed McCloud.

  “Don’t make fun of my note-book!”

  “I shouldn’t dare.” McCloud pointed to it as he spoke to Dicksie. “You should see what is in that note-book: the record, I suppose, of every man in the mountains and of a great many outside.”

  “And countless other things,” added Marion.

  “Such as what?” asked Dicksie.

  “Such as you, for example,” said Marion.

  “Am I a thing?”

  “A sweet thing, of course,” said Marion ironically. “Yes, you; with color of eyes, hair, length of index finger of the right hand, curvature of thumb, disposition––whether peaceable or otherwise, and prison record, if any.”

  “And number of your watch,” added McCloud.

  “How dreadful!”

  Whispering Smith eyed Dicksie benignly. “They are talking this nonsense to distract us, of course, but I am bound to read you what I have here, if you will graciously submit.”

  “Submit? I wait to hear it,” laughed Dicksie.

  “My training in prosody is the slightest, as will appear,” he continued, “and synecdoche and Schenectady were always on the verge of getting mixed when I went to school. My sentiment may be termed obvious, but I want to offer a slight apology on behalf of trouble; it is abused too much. I submit this

  “SONG TO TROUBLE

  “Here’s to the measure of every man’s worth,

  Though when men are wanting it grieves us.

  Hearts that are hollow we’re better without,

  Hearts that are loyal it leaves us.

  “Trouble’s the dowry of every man’s birth,

  A nettle adversity flings us;

  It yields to the grip of the masterful hand,

  When we play coward it stings us.

  “Chorus.”

  “Don’t say chorus; that’s common.”

  “I have to say chorus. My verses don’t speak for themselves, and no one would know it was a chorus if I didn’t explain. Besides, I’m short a line in the chorus, and that is what I’m waiting for to finish the song.

  “Chorus:

  “Then here’s to the bumper that proves every friend!

  And though in the drinking it wrings us,

  Here’s to the cup that we drain to the end,

  And here’s to––

  There I stick. I can’t work out the last line.”

  “And here’s to the hearts that it brings us!” exclaimed Dicksie.

  “Fine!” cried McCloud. “‘Here’s to the hearts that it brings us!’”

  Dicksie threw back her head and laughed with the others. Then Whispering Smith looked grave. “There is a difficulty,” said he, knitting his brows. “You have spoiled my song.”

  “Oh, Mr. Smith, I hope not! Have I?”

  “Your line is so much better than what I have that it makes my stuff sound cheap.”

  “Oh, no, Gordon!” interposed McCloud. “You don’t see that one reason why Miss Dunning’s line sounds better than yours is owing to the differences in your voices. If she will repeat the chorus, finishing with her line, you will see the difference.”

  “Miss Dunning, take the note-book,” begged Whispering Smith.

  “And rise, of course,” suggested McCloud.

  “Oh, the note-book! I shall be afraid to hold it. Where are the verses, Mr. Smith? Is this fine handwriting yours?

  Then here’s to the bumper that proves every friend!

  Isn’t that true?

  And though when we drink it it wrings us,

  ––and it does sometimes!

  Here’s to the cup that we drain to the end,

  Even women have to be plucky, don’t they, Marion?

  And here’s to the hearts that it brings us!”

  Whispering Smith rose before the applause subsided. “I ask you to drink this, standing, in condensed milk.”

  “Have we enough to stand in?” interposed Dicksie.

  “If we stand together in trouble, that ought to be enough,” observed McCloud.

  “We’re doing that without rising, aren’t we?” asked Marion. “If we hadn’t been in trouble we shouldn’t have ventured to this camp to-night.”

  “And if you had not put me to the trouble of following you––and it was a lot of trouble!––I shouldn’t have been in camp to-night,” said Whispering Smith.

  “And if I had not been in trouble this camp wouldn’t have been here to-night,” declared McCloud. “What have we to thank for it all but trouble?”

  A voice called the superintendent’s name through the tent door. “Mr. McCloud?”

  “And there is more trouble,” added McCloud. “What is it, Bill?”

  “Twenty-eight and nine tenths on the gauge, sir.”

  McCloud looked at his companions. “I told you so. Up three-tenths. Thank you, Bill; I’ll be with you in a minute. Tell Cherry to come and take away the supper things, will you? That is about all the water we shall get to-night, I think. It’s all we want,” added McCloud, glancing at his watch. “I’m going to take a look at the river. We shall be quiet now around here until half-past three, and if you, Marion, and Miss Dunning will take the tent, you can have two hours’ rest before we start. Bill Dancing will guard you against intrusion, and if you want ice-water ring twice.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER XXII

  A TALK WITH WHISPERING SMITH

  When Whispering Smith had followed McCloud from the tent, Dicksie turned to Marion and caught her hand. “Is this the terrible man I have heard about?” she murmured. “And I thought him ferocious! But is he as pitiless as they say, Marion?”

  Marion laughed––a troubled little laugh of surprise and sadness. “Dear, he isn’t pitiless at all. He has unpleasant things to do, and does them. He is the man on whom the railroad relies to repress the lawlessness that breaks out in the mountains at times and interferes with the operating of the road. It frightens people away, and prevents others from coming in to settle. Railroads want law and order. Robbery and murders don’t make business for railroads. They depend on settlers for developing a country, don’t you know; otherwise they would have no traffic, not to speak of wanting their trains and men let alone. When Mr. Bucks undertook to open up this country to settlers, he needed a man of patience and endurance and with courage and skill in dealing with lawless men, and no man has ever succeeded so well as this terrible man you have heard about. He is terrible, my dear, to lawless men, not to any one else. He is terrible in resource and in daring, but not in anything else I know of, and I knew him when he was a boy and wore a big pink worsted scarf when he went skating.”

  “I should like to have seen that scarf,” said Dicksie reflectively. She rose and looked around the tent. In a few minutes she made Marion lie down on one of the cots. Then she walked to the front of the tent, opened the flap, and looked out.

  Whispering Smith was sitting before the fire. Rain was falling, but Dicksie put on her close-fitting black coat, raised the door-flap, and walked noiselessly from the tent and up behind him. “Alone in the rain?” she asked.

  She had expected to see him start at her voice, but he did not, though he rose and turned around. “Not now,” he answered as he offered her his box with a smile.

  “Are you taking your hat off for me in the rain? Put it on again!” she insisted with a little tone of command, and she was conscious of gratification when he obeyed amiably.

  “I won’t take your box unless you can find another!” she said. “Oh, you have another! I came out to tell you what a dreadful man I thought you were, and to apologize.”

  “Never mind apologizing. Lots of people think worse than that of me and don’t apologize. I’m sorry I have no shelter to offer you, except to sit o
n this side and take the rain.”

  “Why should you take the rain for me?”

  “You are a woman.”

  “But a stranger to you.”

  “Only in a way.”

  Dicksie gazed for a moment at the fire. “You won’t think me abrupt, will you?” she said, turning to him, “but, as truly as I live, I cannot account for you, Mr. Smith. I guess at the ranch we don’t know what goes on in the world. Everything I see of you contradicts everything I have heard of you.”

  “You haven’t seen much of me yet, you know, and you may have heard much better accounts of me than I deserve. Still, it isn’t surprising you can’t account for me; in fact, it would be surprising if you could. Nobody pretends to do that. You must not be shocked if I can’t even account for myself. Do you know what a derelict is? A ship that has been abandoned but never wholly sinks.”

  “Please don’t make fun of me! How did you happen to come into the mountains? I do want to understand things better.”

  “Why, you are in real earnest, aren’t you? But I am not making fun of you. Do you know President Bucks? No? Too bad! He’s a very handsome old bachelor. And he is one of those men who get all sorts of men to do all sorts of things for them. You know, building and operating railroads in this part of the country is no joke. The mountains are filled with men that don’t care for God, man, or the devil. Sometimes they furnish their own ammunition to fight with and don’t bother the railroad for years; at such times the railroad leaves them alone. For my part, I never quarrel with a man that doesn’t quarrel with the road. Then comes a time when they get after us, shooting our men or robbing our agents or stopping our trains. Of course we have to get busy then. A few years ago they worried Bucks till they nearly turned his hair gray. At that unfortunate time I happened into his office with a letter of introduction from his closest Chicago friend, Willis Howard, prince of good men, the man that made the Palmer House famous––yes. Now I had come out here, Miss Dunning––I almost said Miss Dicksie, because I hear it so much–––”

  “I should be greatly set up to hear you call me Dicksie. And I have wondered a thousand times about your name. Dare I ask––why do they call you Whispering Smith? You don’t whisper.”

  He laughed with abundance of good-humor. “That is a ridiculous accident, and it all came about when I lived in Chicago. Do you know anything about the infernal climate there? Well, in Chicago I used to lose my voice whenever I caught a cold––sometimes for weeks together. So they began calling me Whispering Smith, and I’ve never been able to shake the name. Odd, isn’t it? But I came out to go into the real-estate business. I was looking for some gold-bearing farm lands where I could raise quartz, don’t you know, and such things––yes. I don’t mind telling you this, though I wouldn’t tell it to everybody–––”

  “Certainly not,” assented Dicksie, drawing her skirt around to sit in closer confidence.

  “I wanted to get rich quick,” murmured Whispering Smith, confidentially.

  “Almost criminal, wasn’t it?”

  “I wanted to have evening clothes.”

  “Yes.”

  “And for once in my life two pairs of suspenders––a modest ambition, but a gnawing one. Would you believe it? Before I left Bucks’s office he had hired me for a railroad man. When he asked me what I could do, and I admitted a little experience in handling real estate, he brought his fist down on the table and swore I should be his right-of-way man.”

  “How about the mining?”

  Whispering Smith waved his hand in something of the proud manner in which Bucks could wave his presidential hand. “My business, Bucks said, need not interfere with that, not in the least; he said that I could do all the mining I wanted to, and I have done all the mining I wanted to. But here is the singular thing that happened: I opened up my office and had nothing to do; they didn’t seem to want any right of way just then. I kept getting my check every month, and wasn’t doing a hand’s turn but riding over the country and shooting jack-rabbits. But, Lord, I love this country! Did you know I used to be a cowboy in the mountains years ago? Indeed I did. I know it almost as well as you do. I mined more or less in the meantime. Occasionally I would go to Bucks––you say you don’t know him?––too bad!––and tell him candidly I wasn’t doing a thing to earn my salary. At such times he would only ask me how I liked the job,” and Whispering Smith’s heavy eyebrows rose in mild surprise at the recollection. “One day when I was talking with him he handed me a telegram from the desert saying that a night operator at a lonely station had been shot and a switch misplaced and a train nearly wrecked. He asked me what I thought of it. I discovered that the poor fellow had shot himself, and in the end we had to put him in the insane asylum to save him from the penitentiary––but that was where my trouble began.

  “It ended in my having to organize the special service on the whole road to look after a thousand and one things that nobody else had––well, let us say time or inclination to look after: fraud and theft and violence and all that sort of disagreeable thing. Then one day the cat crawled out of the bag. What do you think? That man who is now president of this road had somewhere seen a highly colored story about me in a magazine, a ten-cent magazine, you know. He had spotted me the first time I walked into his office, and told me a long time afterward it was just like seeing a man walk out of a book, and that he had hard work to keep from falling on my neck. He knew what he wanted me for; it was just this thing. I left Chicago to get away from it, and this is the result. It is not all that kind of thing, oh, no! When they want to cross a reservation I have a winter in Washington with our attorneys and dine with old friends in the White House, and the next winter I may be on snowshoes chasing a band of rustlers. I swore long ago I would do no more of it––that I couldn’t and wouldn’t. But it is Bucks. I can’t go back on him. He is amiable and I am soft. He says he is going to have a crown and harp for me some day, but I fancy––that is, I have an intimation––that there will be a red-hot protest at the bar of Heaven,” he lowered his tone, “from a certain unmentionable quarter when I undertake to put the vestments on. By the way, I hear you are interested in chickens. Oh, yes, I’ve heard a lot about you! Bob Johnson, over at Oroville, has some pretty bantams I want to tell you about.”

  Whether he talked railroad or chickens, it was all one: Dicksie sat spellbound; and when he announced it was half-past three o’clock and time to rouse Marion, she was amazed.

  SCENE FROM THE PHOTO-PLAY PRODUCTION OF “WHISPERING SMITH.” © American Mutual Studio.

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

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

  “And you told him, of course?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him to lose it.”

  “I could have done that myself.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  * * *

  CHAPTER XXIII

  AT THE RIVER

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

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

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