Whispering Smith. Spearman Frank Hamilton
stroked the neck of her horse. “It is about eighteen miles to the ranch house.”
“I don’t call that far.”
“Oh, it isn’t,” she returned hastily, professing not to notice the look that went with the words, “except for perishable things!” Then, as if acknowledging her disadvantage, she added, swinging her bridle-rein around, “I am under obligations for the offer, just the same.”
“At least, won’t you let your horse drink?” McCloud threw the force of an appeal into his words, and Dicksie stopped her preparations and appeared to waver.
“Jim is pretty thirsty, I suppose. Have you plenty of water?”
“A tender full. Had I better lead him down while you wait up on the hill in the shade?”
“Can’t I ride him down?”
“It would be pretty rough riding.”
“Oh, Jim goes anywhere,” she said, with her attractive indifference to situations. “If you don’t mind helping me mount.”
“With pleasure.”
She stood waiting for his hand, and McCloud stood, not knowing just what to do. She glanced at him expectantly. The sun grew intensely hot.
“You will have to show me how,” he stammered at last.
“Don’t you know?”
He mentally cursed the technical education that left him helpless at such a moment, but it was useless to pretend. “Frankly, I don’t!”
“Just give me your hand. Oh, not in that way! But never mind, I’ll walk,” she suggested, catching up her skirt.
“The rocks will cut your boots all to pieces. Suppose you tell me what to do this once,” he said, assuming some confidence. “I’ll never forget.”
“Why, if you will just give me your hand for my foot, I can manage, you know.”
He did not know, but she lifted her skirt graciously, and her crushed boot rested easily for a moment in his hand. She rose in the air above him before he could well comprehend. He felt the quick spring from his supporting hand, and it was an instant of exhilaration. Then she balanced herself with a flushed laugh in the saddle, and he guided her ahead among the loose rocks, the horse nosing at his elbow as they picked their way.
Crossing the track, they gained better ground. As they reached the switch and passed a box car, Jim shied, and Dicksie spoke sharply to him. McCloud turned.
In the shade of the car lay the tramp.
“That man lying there frightened him,” explained Dicksie. “Oh,” she exclaimed suddenly, “he has been hurt!” She turned away her head. “Is that the man who was in the wreck?”
“Yes.”
“Do something for him. He must be suffering terribly.”
“The men gave him some water awhile ago, and when we moved him into the shade we thought he was dead.”
“He isn’t dead yet!” Dicksie’s face, still averted, had grown white. “I saw him move. Can’t you do something for him?”
She reined up at a little distance. McCloud bent over the man a moment and spoke to him. When he rose he called to the men on the track. “You are right,” he said, rejoining Dicksie; “he is very much alive. His name is Wickwire; he is a cowboy.”
“A cowboy!”
“A tramp cowboy.”
“What can you do with him?”
“I’ll have the men put him in the caboose and send him to Barnhardt’s hospital at Medicine Bend when the engine comes back. He may live yet. If he does, he can thank you for it.”
CHAPTER IV
GEORGE McCLOUD
McCloud was an exception to every tradition that goes to make up a mountain railroad man. He was from New England, with a mild voice and a hand that roughened very slowly. McCloud was a classmate of Morris Blood’s at the Boston “Tech,” and the acquaintance begun there continued after the two left school, with a scattering fire of letters between the mountains and New England, as few and as far between as men’s letters usually scatter after an ardent school acquaintance.
There were just two boys in the McCloud family–John and George. One had always been intended for the church, the other for science. Somehow the boys got mixed in their cradles, or, what is the same matter, in their assignments, and John got into the church. For George, who ought to have been a clergyman, nothing was left but a long engineering course for which, after he got it, he appeared to have no use. However, it seemed a little late to shift the life alignments. John had the pulpit and appeared disposed to keep it, and George was left, like a New England farm, to wonder what had become of himself.
It is, nevertheless, odd how matters come about. John McCloud, a prosperous young clergyman, stopped on a California trip at Medicine Bend to see brother George’s classmate and something of a real Western town. He saw nothing sensational–it was there, but he did not see it–but he found both hospitality and gentlemen, and, if surprised, was too well-bred to admit it. His one-day stop ran on to several days. He was a guest at the Medicine Bend Club, where he found men who had not forgotten the Harvard Greek plays. He rode in private cars and ate antelope steak grilled by Glover’s own darky boy, who had roasted buffalo hump for the Grand Duke Alexis as far back as 1871, and still hashed his browned potatoes in ragtime; and with the sun breaking clear over the frosty table-lands, a ravenous appetite, and a day’s shooting in prospect, the rhythm had a particularly cheerful sound. John was asked to occupy a Medicine Bend pulpit, and before Sunday the fame of his laugh and his marksmanship had spread so far that Henry Markover, the Yale cowboy, rode in thirty-two miles to hear him preach. In leaving, John McCloud, in a seventh heaven of enthusiasm over the high country, asked Morris Blood why he could not find something for George out there; and Blood, not even knowing the boy wanted to come, wrote for him, and asked Bucks to give him a job. Possibly, being over-solicitous, George was nervous when he talked to Bucks; possibly the impression left by his big, strong, bluff brother John made against the boy; at all events, Bucks, after he talked with George, shook his head. “I could make a first-class railroad man out of the preacher, Morris, but not out of the brother. Yes, I’ve talked with him. He can’t do anything but figure elevations, and, by heaven, we can’t feed our own engineers here now.” So George found himself stranded in the mountains.
Morris Blood was cut up over it, but George McCloud took it quietly. “I’m no worse off here than I was back there, Morris.” Blood, at that, plucked up courage to ask George to take a job in the Cold Springs mines, and George jumped at it. It was impossible to get a white man to live at Cold Springs after he could save money enough to get away, so George was welcomed as assistant superintendent at the Number Eight Mine, with no salary to speak of and all the work.
In one year everybody had forgotten him. Western men, on the average, show a higher heart temperature than Eastern men, but they are tolerably busy people and have their own troubles. “Be patient,” Morris Blood had said to him. “Sometime there will be more railroad work in these mountains; then, perhaps, your darned engineering may come into play. I wish you knew how to sell cigars.”
Meantime, McCloud stuck to the mine, and insensibly replaced his Eastern tissue with Western. In New England he had been carefully moulded by several generations of gentlemen, but never baked hard. The mountains put the crust on him. For one thing, the sun and wind, best of all hemlocks, tanned his white skin into a tough all-American leather, seasoned his muscles into rawhide sinews, and, without burdening him with an extra ounce of flesh, sprinkled the red through his blood till, though thin, he looked apoplectic.
Insensibly, too, something else came about. George McCloud developed the rarest of all gifts of temperament, even among men of action–the ability to handle men. In Cold Springs, indeed, it was a case either of handling or of being handled. McCloud got along with his men and, with the tough element among them, usually through persuasion; but he proved, too, that he could inspire confidence