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 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."
"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.
[Illustration: SCENE FROM THE PHOTO-PLAY PRODUCTION OF "WHISPERING
SMITH." (C) _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.
"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?"