Whispering Smith

by Spearman, Frank H

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

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

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

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

  * * *

  CHAPTER XLV

  BACK TO THE MOUNTAINS

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

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

  “No, Dicksie.”

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

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

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

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

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

  The door opened and it was George.

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

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

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

  “I have.”

  “I knew it!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I can be ready in thirty minutes.”

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

  “What is it, George?”

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

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

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

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

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

  "Oh, Mr. Bucks!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "As many as that?"

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Nor did I.”

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

  “Why don’t you come back?”

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

  “What need you be afraid to tell me?”

  “That I have loved you so long.”

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

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