Whispering Smith Part 26

She did not move her eyes from the blue hills on the horizon. "I expect you to kill me sometime; I feel sure you will. And that you may do." Then she bent her look on him. "You may do it now if you want to."

His face turned heavy with rage. "Marion," he cried, with an oath, "do you know how close you are to death at this moment?"

"You may do it now."

He clinched the bench-rail and rose slowly to his feet. Marion sat motionless in the hickory chair; the sun was s.h.i.+ning in her face and her hands were folded in her lap. d.i.c.ksie rocked on the porch. In the shadow of the house the man was mending the saddle.

CHAPTER XXVI

TOWER W

At the end of a long and neglected hall on the second floor of the old bank block in Hill Street, Whispering Smith had a room in which he made headquarters at Medicine Bend; it was in effect Whispering Smith's home. A man's room is usually a forlorn affair in spite of any effort to make it home-like. If he neglects his room it looks barren, and if he ornaments it it looks fussy. Boys can do something with a den because they are not yet men, and some tincture of woman's nature still clings to a boy. Girls are born to the deftness that is to become all theirs in the touch of a woman's hand; but men, if they walk alone, pay the penalty of loneliness.

Whispering Smith, being logical, made no effort to decorate his domestic poverty. All his belongings were of a simple sort and his room was as bare as a Jesuit's. Moreover, his affairs, being at times highly particular, did not admit of the presence of a janitor in his quarters, and he was of necessity his own janitor. His iron bed was spread with a pair of Pullman blankets, his toilet arrangements included nothing more elaborate than a shaving outfit, and the mirror above his washstand was only large enough to make a hurried shave, with much neck-stretching, possible. The table was littered with letters, but it filled up one corner of the room, and a rocking-chair and a trunk filled up another. The floor was spread with a Navajo blanket, and near the head of the bed stood an old-fas.h.i.+oned wardrobe.

This served not to ward Whispering Smith's robes, which hung for the most part on his back, but to accommodate his rifles, of which it contained an array that only a practised man could understand. The wardrobe was more, however, than an armory. Beside the guns that stood racked in precision along the inner wall, McCloud had once, to his surprise, seen a violin. It appeared out of keeping in such an atmosphere and rather the ant.i.thesis of force and violence than a complement for it. And again, though the rifles were disquietingly bright and effective-looking, the violin was old and shabby, hanging obscurely in its corner, as if, whatever it might have in common with its master, it had nothing in common with its surroundings.

The door of the room in the course of many years had been mutilated with keyholes and reenforced with locks until it appeared difficult to choose an opening that would really afford entrance; but two men besides Whispering Smith carried keys to the room--Kennedy and George McCloud. They had right of way into it at all hours, and knew how to get in.

McCloud had left the bridge camp on the river for Medicine Bend on the Sat.u.r.day that Marion Sinclair--whose husband had finally told her he would give her one more chance to think it over--returned with d.i.c.ksie safely from their trip to the Frenchman ranch.

Whispering Smith, who had been with Bucks and Morris Blood, got back to town the same day. The president and general manager were at the Wickiup during the afternoon, and left for the East at nine o'clock in the evening, when their car was attached to an east-bound pa.s.senger train. McCloud took supper afterward with Whispering Smith at a Front Street chop-house, and the two men separated at eleven o'clock. It was three hours later when McCloud tapped on the door of Smith's room, and in a moment opened it. "Awake, Gordon?"

"Sure: come in. What is it?"

"The second section of the pa.s.senger train--Number Three, with the express cars--was stopped at Tower W to-night. Oliver Sollers was pulling; he is badly shot up, and one of the messengers was shot all to pieces. They cracked the through safe, emptied it, and made a clean get-away."

"Tower W--two hundred and seventy-six miles. Have you ordered up an engine?"

"Yes."

"Where's Kennedy?"

A second voice answered: "Right here."

"Strike a light, Farrell. What about the horses?"

"They're being loaded."

"Is the line clear?"

"Rooney Lee is clearing it."

"Spike it, George, and leave every westbound train in siding, with the engine cut loose and plenty of steam, till we get by. It's now or never this time. Two hundred and seventy-six miles; they're giving us our money's worth. Who's going with us, Farrell?"

"Bob Scott, Reed Young, and Brill, if Reed can get him at Sleepy Cat.

Dancing is loading the horses."

"I want Ed Banks to lead a _posse_ straight from here for Williams Cache; Dancing can go with him. And telephone Gene and Bob Johnson to sit down in Canadian Pa.s.s till they grow to the rocks, but not to let anybody through if they want to live after I see them. They've got all the instructions; all they need is the word. It's a long chance, but I think these are our friends. You can head Banks off by telephone somewhere if we change our minds when we get a trail. Start Brill Young and a good man from Sleepy Cat ahead of us, George, if you can, in a baggage car with any horses that they can get there. They can be at Tower W by daybreak and perhaps pick up a trail before we reach there, and we shall have fresh horses for them. I'm ready, I guess; let's go. Slam the door, George!" In the hall Whispering Smith threw a pocket-light on his watch. "I want you to put us there by seven o'clock."

"Charlie Sollers is going to pull you," answered McCloud. "Have you got everything? Then we're off." The three men tiptoed down the dark hall, down the stairs, and across the street on a noiseless run for the railroad yard.

The air was chill and the sky clear, with a moon more than half to the full. "Lord, what a night to ride!" exclaimed Whispering Smith, looking mournfully at the stars. "Well planned, well planned, I must admit."

The men hastened toward the yard, where lanterns were moving about the car of the train-guards near the Blue Front stables. The loading board had been lowered, and the horses were being carefully led into the car. From a switch engine behind the car a shrill cloud of steam billowed into the air. Across the yard a great pa.s.senger engine, its huge white side-rod rising and falling slowly in the still light of the moon--one of the mountain racers, thick-necked like an athlete and deep-chested--was backing down for the run with the single car almost across the west end of the division. Trainmen were running to and from the Wickiup platform. By the time the horses were loaded the conductor had orders. Until the last minute, Whispering Smith was in consultation with McCloud, and giving Dancing precise instructions for the _posse_ into the Cache country. They were still talking at the side door of the car, McCloud and Dancing on the ground and Whispering Smith squatting on his haunches inside the moving car, when the engine signalled and the special drew away from the chute, pounded up the long run of the ladder switch, and moved with gathering speed into the canyon. In the cab Charlie Sollers, crus.h.i.+ng in his hand the tissue that had brought the news of his brother's death, sat at the throttle. He had no speed orders. They had only told him he had a clear track.

CHAPTER XXVII

PURSUIT

Brill Young picked up a trail Sunday morning at Tower W before the special from Medicine Bend reached there. The wrecked express car, which had been set out, had no story to tell. "The only story," said Whispering Smith, as the men climbed into their saddles, "is in the one from the hoofs, and the sooner we get after it the better."

The country around Tower W, which is itself an operating point on the western end of the division, a mere speck on the desert, lies high and rolling. To the south, sixty miles away, rise the Grosse Terre Mountains, and to the north and west lie the solitudes of the Heart range, while in the northeast are seen the three white Saddle peaks of the Missions. The cool, bright suns.h.i.+ne of a far and lonely horizon greets the traveller here, and ten miles away from the railroad, in any direction, a man on horseback and unacquainted with the country would wish himself--mountain men will tell you--in h.e.l.l, because it would be easier to ride out of.

To the railroad men the country offered no unusual difficulties. The Youngs were as much at home on a horse as on a hand car. Kennedy, though a large and powerful man, was inured to hard riding, and Bob Scott and Whispering Smith in the saddle were merely a part--though an important part--of their horses; without killing their mounts, they could get out of them every mile in their legs. The five men covered twenty miles on a trail that read like print. One after another of the railroad party commented on the carelessness with which it had been left. But twenty miles south of the railroad, in an open and comparatively easy country, it was swallowed completely up in the tracks of a hundred horses. The railroad men circled far and wide, only to find the herd tracks everywhere ahead of them.

"This is a beautiful job," murmured Whispering Smith as the party rode together along the edge of a creek-bottom. "Now who is their friend down in this country? What man would get out a bunch of horses like this and work them this hard so early in the morning? Let's hunt that man up. I like to meet a man that is a friend in need."

Bob Scott spoke: "I saw a man with some horses in a canyon across the creek a few minutes ago, and I saw a ranch-house behind those b.u.t.tes when I rode around them."

"Stop! Here's a man riding right into our jaws," muttered Kennedy.

"Divide up among the rocks." A horseman from the south came galloping up the creek, and Kennedy rode out with an ivory smile to meet him.

The two men parleyed for a moment, disputed each other sharply, and rode together back to the railroad party.

"Haven't seen any men looking for horses this morning, have you?"

asked Whispering Smith, eying the stranger, a squat, square-jawed fellow with a cataract eye.

"I'm looking for horses myself. I ain't seen anybody else. What are you looking for?"

"Is this your bunch of horses that got loose here?" asked Smith.

"No."

"I thought," said Kennedy, smiling, "you said a minute ago they were."

The stranger fixed his cataract on him like a flash-light. "I changed my mind."

Whispering Smith's brows rose protestingly, but he spoke with perfect amiability as he raised his finger to bring the good eye his way. "You ought to change your hat when you change your mind. I saw you driving a bunch of horses up that canyon a few minutes ago. Now, Rockstro, do you still drag your left leg?"

The rancher looked steadily at his new inquisitor, but blinked like a gopher at the sudden onslaught. "Which of you fellows is Whispering Smith?" he demanded.