Whispering Smith

by Spearman, Frank H

  “Hang the company! The claim agents are a pack of thieves,” cried Sinclair. “Look here, McCloud, what’s a pay check to a man that’s sick, compared with a bottle of good wine?”

  “When one of your men is sick and needs wine, let me know,” returned McCloud; “I’ll see that he gets it. Your men don’t wear silk dresses, do they?” he asked, pointing to another case of goods under the driver’s seat. “Have that stuff all hauled back and loaded into a box car on track.”

  “Not by a damned sight!” exclaimed Sinclair. He turned to his ranch driver, Barney Rebstock. “You haul that stuff where you were told to haul it, Barney.” Then, “you and I may as well have an understanding right here,” he said, as McCloud walked to the head of the mules.

  “By all means, and I’ll begin by countermanding that order right now. Take your load straight back to that car,” directed McCloud, pointing up the track. Barney, a ranch hand with a cigarette face looked surlily at McCloud.

  Sinclair raised a finger at the boy. “You drive straight ahead where I told you to drive. I don’t propose to have my affairs interfered with by you or anybody else, Mr. McCloud. You and I can settle this thing ourselves,” he added, walking straight toward the superintendent.

  “Get away from those mules!” yelled Barney at the same moment, cracking his whip.

  McCloud’s dull eyes hardly lightened as he looked at the driver. “Don’t swing your whip this way, my boy,” he said, laying hold quietly of the near bridle.

  “Drop that bridle!” roared Sinclair.

  “I’ll drop your mules in their tracks if they move one foot forward. Dancing, unhook those traces,” said McCloud peremptorily. “Dump the wine out of that wagon-box, Young.” Then he turned to Sinclair and pointed to the wreck. “Get back to your work.”

  The sun marked the five men rooted for an instant on the hillside. Dancing jumped at the traces, Reed Young clambered over the wheel, and Sinclair, livid, faced McCloud. With a bitter denunciation of interlopers, claim agents, and “fresh” railroad men generally, Sinclair swore he would not go back to work, and a case of wine crashing to the ground infuriated him. He turned on his heel and started for the wreck. “Call off the men!” he yelled to Karg at the derrick. The foreman passed the word. The derrickmen, dropping their hooks and chains in some surprise, moved out of the wreckage. The axemen and laborers gathered around the foreman and followed him toward Sinclair.

  “Boys,” cried Sinclair, “we’ve got a new superintendent, a college guy. You know what they are; the company has tried ’em before. They draw the salaries and we do the work. This one down here now is making his little kick about the few pickings we get out of our jobs. You can go back to your work or you can stand right here with me till we get our rights. What?”

  Half a dozen men began talking at once. The derrickman from below, a hatchet-faced wiper, with the visor of a greasy cap cocked over his ear, stuck his head between the uprights and called out shrilly, “What’s er matter, Murray?” and a few men laughed. Barney had deserted the mules. Dancing and Young, with small regard for loss or damage, were emptying the wagon like deckhands, for in a fight such as now appeared imminent, possession of the goods even on the ground seemed vital to prestige. McCloud waited only long enough to assure the emptying of the wagon, and then followed Sinclair to where he had assembled his men. “Sinclair, put your men back to work.”

  “Not till we know just how we stand,” Sinclair answered insolently. He continued to speak, but McCloud turned to the men. “Boys, go back to your work. Your boss and I can settle our own differences. I’ll see that you lose nothing by working hard.”

  “And you’ll see we make nothing, won’t you?” suggested Karg.

  “I’ll see that every man in the crew gets twice what is coming to him––all except you, Karg. I discharge you now. Sinclair, will you go back to work?”

  “No!”

  “Then take your time. Any men that want to go back to work may step over to the switch,” added McCloud.

  Not a man moved. Sinclair and Karg smiled at each other, and with no apparent embarrassment McCloud himself smiled. “I like to see men loyal to their bosses,” he said good-naturedly. “I wouldn’t give much for a man that wouldn’t stick to his boss if he thought him right. But a question has come up here, boys, that must be settled once for all. This wreck-looting on the mountain division is going to stop––right here––at this particular wreck. On that point there is no room for discussion. Now, any man that agrees with me on that matter may step over here and I’ll discuss with him any other grievance. If what I say about looting is a grievance, it can’t be discussed. Is there any man that wants to come over?” No man stirred.

  “Sinclair, you’ve got good men,” continued McCloud, unmoved. “You are leading them into pretty deep water. There’s a chance yet for you to get them out of serious trouble if you think as much of them as they do of you. Will you advise them to go back to work––all except Karg?”

  Sinclair glared in high humor. “Oh, I couldn’t do that! I’m discharged!” he protested, bowing low.

  “I don’t want to be over-hasty,” returned McCloud. “This is a serious business, as you know better than they do, and there will never be as good a time to fix it up as now. There is a chance for you, I say, Sinclair, to take hold if you want to now.”

  “Why, I’ll take hold if you’ll take your nose out of my business and agree to keep it out.”

  “Is there any man here that wants to go back to work for the company?” continued McCloud evenly. It was one man against thirty; McCloud saw there was not the shadow of a chance to win the strikers over. “This lets all of you out, you understand, boys,” he added; “and you can never work again for the company on this division if you don’t take hold now.”

  “Boys,” exclaimed Sinclair, better-humored every moment, “I’ll guarantee you work on this division when all the fresh superintendents are run out of the country, and I’ll lay this matter before Bucks himself, and don’t you forget it!”

  “You will have a chilly job of it,” interposed McCloud.

  “So will you, my hearty, before you get trains running past here,” retorted the wrecking boss. “Come on, boys.”

  The disaffected men drew off. The emptied wagon, its load scattered on the ground, stood deserted on the hillside, and the mules drooped in the heat. Bill Dancing, a giant and a dangerous one, stood lone guard over the loot, and Young had been called over by McCloud. “How many men have you got with you, Reed?”

  “Eleven.”

  “How long will it take them to clean up this mess with what help we can run in this afternoon?”

  Young studied the prospect before replying. “They’re green at this sort of thing, of course; they might be fussing here till to-morrow noon, I’m afraid; perhaps till to-morrow night, Mr. McCloud.”

  “That won’t do!” The two men stood for a moment in a study. “The merchandise is all unloaded, isn’t it?” said McCloud reflectively. “Get your men here and bring a water-bucket with you.”

  McCloud walked down to the engine of the wrecking train and gave orders to the train and engine crews. The best of the refrigerator cars had been rerailed, and they were pulled to a safe distance from the wreck. Young brought the bucket, and McCloud pointed to the caskful of brandy. “Throw that brandy over the wreckage, Reed.”

  The roadmaster started. “Burn the whole thing up, eh?”

  “Everything on the track.”

  “Bully! It’s a shame to waste the liquor, but it’s Sinclair’s fault. Here, boys, scatter this stuff where it will catch good, and touch her off. Everything goes––the whole pile. Burn up everything; that’s orders. If you can get a few rails here, now, I’ll give you a track by sundown, Mr. McCloud, in spite of Sinclair and the devil.”

  The remains of many cars lay in heaps along the curve, and the trackmen like firebugs ran in and out of them. A tongue of flame leaped from the middle of a pile of stock cars. In five minutes th
e wreck was burning; in ten minutes the flames were crackling fiercely; then in another instant the wreck burst into a conflagration that rose hissing and seething a hundred feet straight up in the air.

  From where they stood, Sinclair’s men looked on. They were nonplussed, but their boss had not lost his nerve. He walked back to McCloud. “You’re going to send us back to Medicine Bend with the car, I suppose?”

  McCloud spoke amiably. “Not on your life. Take your personal stuff out of the car and tell your men to take theirs; then get off the train and off the right of way.”

  “Going to turn us loose on Red Desert, are you?” asked Sinclair steadily.

  “You’ve turned yourselves loose.”

  “Wouldn’t give a man a tie-pass, would you?”

  “Come to my office in Medicine Bend and I’ll talk to you about it,” returned McCloud impassively.

  “Well, boys,” roared Sinclair, going back to his followers, “we can’t ride on this road now! But I want to tell you there’s something to eat for every one of you over at my place on the Crawling Stone, and a place to sleep––and something to drink,” he added, cursing McCloud once more.

  The superintendent eyed him, but made no response. Sinclair led his men to the wagon, and they piled into it till the box was filled. Barney Rebstock had the reins again, and the mules groaned as the whip cracked. Those that could not climb into the wagon as it moved off straggled along behind, and the air was filled with cheers and curses.

  The wreck burned furiously, and the column of black smoke shot straight up. Sinclair, as his cavalcade moved over the hill, followed on foot, grimly. He was the last to cross the divide that shut the scene on the track away from the striking wreckers, and as he reached the crest he paused and looked back, standing for a moment like a statue outlined in the vivid sunshine. For all his bravado, something told him he should never handle another wreck on the mountain division––that he stood a king dethroned. Uninviting enough to many men, this had been his kingdom, and he loved the power it gave him. He had run it like many a reckless potentate, but no one could say he had not been royal in his work as well as in his looting. It was impossible not to admire the man, his tremendous capacity, his extraordinary power as a leader; and no one liked his better traits more than McCloud himself. But Sinclair never loved McCloud. Long afterward he told Whispering Smith that he made his first mistake in a long and desperate game in not killing McCloud when he laid his hand that morning on the bridle of the mules; it would have been easy then. Sinclair might have been thinking of it even as he stood looking back. But he stood only for a moment, then turned and passed over the hill.

  * * *

  CHAPTER III

  DICKSIE

  The wreckers, drifting in the blaze of the sun across the broad alkali valley, saw the smoke of the wreck-fire behind them. No breath of wind stirred it. With the stillness of a signal column it rose, thin and black, and high in the air spread motionless, like a huge umbrella, above Smoky Creek. Reed Young had gone with an engine to wire reënforcements, and McCloud, active among the trackmen until the conflagration spent itself, had retired to the shade of the hill.

  Reclining against a rock with his legs crossed, he had clasped his hands behind his head and sat looking at the iron writhing in the dying heat of the fire. The sound of hoofs aroused him, and looking below he saw a horsewoman reining up near his men at the wreck. She rode an American horse, thin and rangy, and the experienced way in which she checked him drew him back almost to his haunches. But McCloud’s eyes were fixed on the slender figure of the rider. He was wholly at a loss to account, at such a time and in such a place, for a visitor in gauntleted gloves and a banded Panama hat. He studied her with growing amazement. Her hair coiled low on her neck supported the very free roll of the hat-brim. Her black riding-skirt clung to her waist to form its own girdle, and her white stock, rolled high on her neck, rose above a heavy shirtwaist of white linen, and gave her an air of confident erectness. The trackmen stopped work to look, but her attitude in their gaze was one of impatience rather than of embarrassment. Her boot flashed in the stirrup while she spoke to the nearest man, and her horse stretched his neck and nosed the brown alkali-grass that spread thinly along the road.

  To McCloud she was something like an apparition. He sat spellbound until the trackman indiscreetly pointed him out, and the eyes of the visitor, turning his way, caught him with his hands on the rock in an attitude openly curious. She turned immediately away, but McCloud rose and started down the hill. The horse’s head was pulled up, and there were signs of departure. He quickened his steps. Once he saw, or thought he saw, the rider’s head so turned that her eyes might have commanded one approaching from his quarter; yet he could catch no further glimpse of her face. A second surprise awaited him. Just as she seemed about to ride away, she dropped lightly from the horse to the ground, and he saw how confident in figure she was. As she began to try her saddle-girths, McCloud attempted a greeting. She could not ignore his hat, held rather high above his head as he approached, but she gave him the slightest nod in return––one that made no attempt to explain why she was there or where she had come from.

  “Pardon me,” ventured McCloud, “have you lost your way?”

  He was immediately conscious that he had said the wrong thing. The expression of her eyes implied that it was foolish to suppose she was lost but she only answered, “I saw the smoke and feared the bridge was on fire.”

  Something in her voice made him almost sorry he had intervened; if she stood in need of help of any sort it was not apparent, and her gaze was confusing. He became conscious that he was at the worst for an inspection; his face felt streaky with smoke, his hat and shirt had suffered severely in directing the fire, and his hands were black. He said to himself in revenge that she was not pretty, despite the fact that she seemed completely to take away his consequence. He felt, while she inspected him, like a brakeman.

  “I presume Mr. Sinclair is here?” she said presently.

  “I am sorry to say he is not.”

  “He usually has charge of the wrecks, I think. What a dreadful fire!” she murmured, looking down the track. She stood beside the horse with one hand resting on her girdle. Around the hand that held the bridle her quirt lay coiled in the folds of her glove, and, though seemingly undecided as to what to do, her composure did not lessen. As she looked at the wreckage, a breath of wind lifted the hair that curled around her ear. The mountain wind playing on her neck had left it brown, and above, the pulse of her ride rose red in her cheek. “Was it a passenger wreck?” She turned abruptly on McCloud to ask the question. Her eyes were brown, too, he saw, and a doubt assailed him. Was she pretty?

  “Only a freight wreck,” he answered.

  “I thought if there were passengers hurt I could send help from the ranch. Were you the conductor?”

  “Fortunately not.”

  “And no one was hurt?”

  “Only a tramp. We are burning the wreck to clear the track.”

  “From the divide it looked like a mountain on fire. I’m sorry Mr. Sinclair is not here.”

  “Why, indeed, yes, so am I.”

  “Because I know him. You are one of his men, I presume.”

  “Not exactly; but is there anything I can do–––”

  “Oh, thank you, nothing, except that you might tell him the pretty bay colt he sent over to us has sprung his shoulder.”

  “He will be sorry to hear it, I’m sure.”

  “But we are doing everything possible for him. He is going to make a perfectly lovely horse.”

  “And whom may I say the message is from?” Though disconcerted, McCloud was regaining his wits. He felt perfectly certain there was no danger, if she knew Sinclair and lived in the mountains, but that she would sometime find out he was not a conductor. When he asked his question she appeared slightly surprised and answered easily, “Mr. Sinclair will know it is from Dicksie Dunning.”

  McCloud knew her then. Every one
knew Dicksie Dunning in the high country. This was Dicksie Dunning of the great Crawling Stone ranch, most widely known of all the mountain ranches. While his stupidity in not guessing her identity before overwhelmed him, he resolved to exhaust the last effort to win her interest.

  “I don’t know just when I shall see Mr. Sinclair,” he answered gravely, “but he shall certainly have your message.”

  A doubt seemed to steal over Dicksie at the change in McCloud’s manner. “Oh, pardon me––I thought you were working for the company.”

  “You are quite right, I am; but Mr. Sinclair is not.”

  Her eyebrows rose a little. “I think you are mistaken, aren’t you?”

  “It is possible I am; but if he is working for the company, it is pretty certain that I am not,” he continued, heaping mystification on her. “However, that will not prevent my delivering the message. By the way, may I ask which shoulder?”

  “Shoulder!”

  “Which shoulder is sprung.”

  “Oh, of course! The right shoulder, and it is sprung pretty badly, too, Cousin Lance says. How very stupid of me to ride over here for a freight wreck!”

  McCloud felt humiliated at having nothing better worth while to offer. “It was a very bad one,” he ventured.

  “But not of the kind I can be of any help at, I fear.”

  McCloud smiled. “We are certainly short of help.”

  Dicksie brought her horse’s head around. She felt again of the girth as she replied, “Not such as I can supply, I’m afraid.” And with the words she stepped away, as if preparing to mount.

  McCloud intervened. “I hope you won’t go away without resting your horse. The sun is so hot. Mayn’t I offer you some sort of refreshment?”

  Dicksie Dunning thought not.

  “The sun is very warm,” persisted McCloud.

  Dicksie smoothed her gauntlet in the assured manner natural to her. “I am pretty well used to it.”