AT THE DOOR
She woke in a dream of hoofs beating at her brain. Distracted words
fell from her lips, and when she opened her swollen eyes and saw those
about her she could only scream.
Marion had called up the stable, but the stablemen could only tell her
that Dicksie's horse, in terrible condition, had come in riderless.
While Barnhardt, the railway surgeon, at the bedside administered
restoratives, Marion talked with him of Dicksie's sudden and
mysterious coming. Dicksie, lying in pain and quite conscious, heard
all, but, unable to explain, moaned in her helplessness. She heard
Marion at length tell the doctor that McCloud was out of town, and the
news seemed to bring back her senses. Then, rising in the bed, while
the surgeon and Marion coaxed her to lie down, she clutched at their
arms and, looking from one to the other, told her story. When it was
done she swooned, but she woke to hear voices at the door of the shop.
She heard as if she dreamed, but at the door the words were dread
reality. Sinclair had made good his word, and had come out of the
storm with a summons upon Marion and it was the surgeon who threw open
the door and saw Sinclair standing in the snow.
No man in Medicine Bend knew Sinclair more thoroughly or feared him
less than Barnhardt. No man could better meet him or speak to him with
less of hesitation. Sinclair, as he faced Barnhardt, was not easy in
spite of his dogged self-control; and he was standing, much to his
annoyance, in the glare of an arc-light that swung across the street
in front of the shop. He was well aware that no such light had ever
swung within a block of the shop before and in it he saw the hand of
Whispering Smith. The light was unexpected, Barnhardt was a surprise,
and even the falling snow, which protected him from being seen twenty
feet away, angered him. He asked curtly who was ill, and without
awaiting an answer asked for his wife.
The surgeon eyed him coldly. "Sinclair, what are you doing in Medicine
Bend? Have you come to surrender yourself?"
"Surrender myself? Yes, I'm ready any time to surrender myself. Take
me along yourself, Barnhardt, if you think I've done worse than any
man would that has been hounded as I've been hounded. I want to see my
wife."
"Sinclair, you can't see your wife."
"What's the matter--is she sick?"
"No, but you can't see her."
"Who says I can't see her?"
"I say so."
Sinclair swept the ice furiously from his beard and his right hand
fell to his hip as he stepped back. "You've turned against me too,
have you, you gray-haired wolf? Can't see her! Get out of that door."
The surgeon pointed his finger at the murderer. "No, I won't get out
of this door. Shoot, you coward! Shoot an unarmed man. You will not
live to get a hundred feet away. This place is watched for you; you
could not have got within a hundred yards of it to-night except for
this snow." Barnhardt pointed through the storm. "Sinclair, you will
hang in the court-house square, and I will take the last beat of your
pulse with these fingers, and when I pronounce you dead they will cut
you down. You want to see your wife. You want to kill her. Don't lie;
you want to kill her. You were heard to say as much to-night at the
Dunning ranch. You were watched and tracked, and you are expected and
looked for here. Your best friends have gone back on you. Ay, curse
again and over again, but that will not put Ed Banks on his feet."
Sinclair stamped with frenzied oaths. "You're too hard on me," he
cried, clenching his hands. "I say you're too hard. You've heard one
side of it. Is that the way you put judgment on a man that's got no
friends left because they start a new lie on him every day? Who is it
that's watching me? Let them stand out like men in the open. If they
want me, let them come like men and take me!"
"Sinclair, this storm gives you a chance to get away; take it. Bad as
you are, there are men in Medicine Bend who knew you when you were a
man. Don't stay here for some of them to sit on the jury that hangs
you. If you can get away, get away. If I were your friend--and God
knows whom you can call friend in Medicine Bend to-night--I couldn't
say more. Get away before it is too late."
He was never again seen alive in Medicine Bend. They tracked him next
day over every foot of ground he had covered. They found where he had
left his spent horse and where afterward he had got the fresh one.
They learned how he had eluded all the picketing planned for precisely
such a contingency, got into the Wickiup, got upstairs and burst open
the very door of McCloud's room. But Dicksie had on her side that
night One greater than her invincible will or her faithful horse.
McCloud was two hundred miles away.
Barnhardt lost no time in telephoning the Wickiup that Sinclair was in
town, but within an hour, while the two women were still under the
surgeon's protection, a knock at the cottage door gave them a second
fright. Barnhardt answered the summons. He opened the door and, as the
man outside paused to shake the snow off his hat, the surgeon caught
him by the shoulder and dragged into the house Whispering Smith.
Picking the icicles from his hair, Smith listened to all that
Barnhardt said, his eyes roving meantime over everything within the
room and mentally over many things outside it. He congratulated
Barnhardt, and when Marion came into the room he apologized for the
snow he had brought in. Dicksie heard his voice and cried out from the
bedroom. They could not keep her away, and she ran out to catch his
hands and plead with him not to go away. He tried to assure her that
the danger was over; that guards were now outside everywhere, and
would be until morning. But Dicksie clung to him and would take no
refusal.
Whispering Smith looked at her in amazement and in admiration. "You
are captain to-night, Miss Dicksie, by Heaven. If you say the word
I'll lie here on a rug till morning. But that man will not be back
to-night. You are a queen. If I had a mountain girl that would do as
much as that for me I would----"
"What would you do?" asked Marion.
"Say good-by to this accursed country forever."