Whispering Smith
As to the millinery business, it was never, after Marion bought the shop, more than moderately successful. The demand that existed in Medicine Bend for red hats of the picture sort Marion declined to recognize. For customers who sought these she turned out hats of sombre coloring calculated to inspire gloom rather than revelry, and she naturally failed to hold what might be termed the miscellaneous business. But after Dicksie Dunning of the Stone Ranch, fresh from the convent, rode into the shop, or if not into it nearly so, and, gliding through the door, ordered a hat out of hand, Marion always had some business. All Medicine Bend knew Dicksie Dunning, who dressed stunningly, rode famously, and was so winningly democratic that half the town never called her anything, at a distance, but Dicksie.
The first hat was a small affair but haughty. The materials were unheard of in Marion’s stock and had to be sent for. Marion’s arrangements with the jobbing houses always had a C. O. D. complexion; the jobbers maintained that this saved book-keeping, and Marion, who of course never knew any better, paid the double express charges like a lamb. She acted, too, as banker for the other impecunious tradespeople in the block, and as this included nearly all of them she was often pressed for funds herself. McCloud undertook sometimes to intervene and straighten out her millinery affairs. One evening he went so far as to attempt an inventory of her stock and some schedule of her accounts; but Marion, with the front-shop curtains closely drawn and McCloud perspiring on a step-ladder, inspecting boxes of feathers and asking stern questions, would look so pathetically sweet and helpless when she tried to recall what things cost that McCloud could not be angry with her; indeed, the pretty eyes behind the patient spectacles would disarm any one. In the end he took inventory on the basis of the retail prices, dividing it afterward by five, as Marion estimated the average profit in the business at five hundred per cent.–this being what the woman she bought out had told her.
How then, McCloud asked himself, could Marion be normally hard pressed for money? He talked to her learnedly about fixed charges, but even these seemed difficult to arrive at. There was no rent, because the building belonged to the railroad company, and when the real-estate and tax man came around and talked to McCloud about rent for the Boney Street property, McCloud told him to chase himself. There was no insurance, because no one would dream of insuring Marion’s stock boxes; there were no bills payable, because no travelling man would advise a line of credit to an inexperienced and, what was worse, an unpractical milliner. Marion did her own trimming, so there were no salaries except to Katie Dancing. It puzzled McCloud to find the leak. How could he know that Marion was keeping nearly all the block supplied with funds? So McCloud continued to raise the price of his table-board, and, though Marion insisted he was paying her too much, held that he must be eating her out of house and home.
In her dining-room, which connected through a curtained door with the shop, McCloud sat one day alone eating his dinner. Marion was in front serving a customer. McCloud heard voices in the shop, but gave no heed till a man walked through the curtained doorway and he saw Murray Sinclair standing before him. The stormy interview with Callahan and Blood at the Wickiup had taken place just a week before, and McCloud, after what Sinclair had then threatened, though not prepared, felt as he saw him that anything might occur. McCloud being in possession of the little room, however, the initiative fell on Sinclair, who, looking his best, snatched his hat from his head and bowed ironically. “My mistake,” he said blandly.
“Come right in,” returned McCloud, not knowing whether Marion had a possible hand in her husband’s unexpected appearance. “Do you want to see me?”
“I don’t,” smiled Sinclair; “and to be perfectly frank,” he added with studied consideration, “I wish to God I never had seen you. Well–you’ve thrown me, McCloud.”
“You’ve thrown yourself, haven’t you, Murray?”
“From your point of view, of course. But, McCloud, this is a small country for two points of view. Do you want to get out of it, or do you want me to?”
“The country suits me, Sinclair.”
“No man that has ever played me dirt can stay here while I stay.” Sinclair, with a hand on the portière, was moving from the doorway into the room. McCloud in a leisurely way rose, though with a slightly flushed face, and at that juncture Marion ran into the room and spoke abruptly. “Here is the silk, Mr. Sinclair,” she exclaimed, handing to him a package she had not finished wrapping. “I meant you to wait in the other room.”
“It was an accidental intrusion,” returned Sinclair, maintaining his irony. “I have apologized, and Mr. McCloud and I understand one another better than ever.”
“Please say to Miss Dunning,” continued Marion, nervous and insistent, “that the band for her riding-hat hasn’t come yet, but it should be here to-morrow.”
As she spoke McCloud leaned across the table, resolved to take advantage of the opening, if it cost him his life. “And by the way, Mr. Sinclair, Miss Dunning wished me to say to you that the lovely bay colt you sent her had sprung his shoulder badly, the hind shoulder, I think, but they are doing everything possible for it and they think it will make a great horse.”
Sinclair’s snort at the information was a marvel of indecision. Was he being made fun of? Should he draw and end it? But Marion faced him resolutely as he stood, and talking in the most business-like way she backed him out of the room and to the shop door. Balked of his opportunity, he retreated stubbornly but with the utmost politeness, and left with a grin, lashing his tail, so to speak.
Coming back, Marion tried to hide her uneasiness under even tones to McCloud. “I’m sorry he disturbed you. I was attending to a customer and had to ask him to wait a moment.”
“Don’t apologize for having a customer.”
“He lives over beyond the Stone Ranch, you know, and is taking some things out for the Dunnings to-day. He likes an excuse to come in here because it annoys me. Finish your dinner, Mr. McCloud.”
“Thank you, I’m done.”
“But you haven’t eaten anything. Isn’t your steak right?”
“It’s fine, but that man–well, you know how I like him and how he likes me. I’ll content myself with digesting my temper.”
CHAPTER VIII
SMOKY CREEK BRIDGE
It was not alone that a defiance makes a bad dinner sauce: there was more than this for McCloud to feed on. He was forced to confess to himself as he walked back to the Wickiup that the most annoying feature of the incident was the least important, namely, that his only enemy in the country should be intrusted with commissions from the Stone Ranch and be carrying packages for Dicksie Dunning. It was Sinclair’s trick to do things for people, and to make himself so useful that they must like first his obligingness and afterward himself. Sinclair, McCloud knew, was close in many ways to Lance Dunning. It was said to have been his influence that won Dunning’s consent to sell a right of way across the ranch for the new Crawling Stone Line. But McCloud felt it useless to disguise the fact to himself that he now had a second keen interest in the Crawling Stone country–not alone a dream of a line, but a dream of a girl. Sitting moodily in his office, with his feet on the desk, a few nights after his encounter with Sinclair, he recalled her nod as she said good-by. It had seemed the least bit encouraging, and he meditated anew on the only twenty minutes of real pleasurable excitement he had ever felt in his life, the twenty minutes with Dicksie Dunning at Smoky Creek. Her intimates, he had heard, called her Dicksie, and he was vaguely envying her intimates when the night despatcher, Rooney Lee, opened the door and disturbed his reflections.
“How is Number One, Rooney?” called McCloud, as if nothing but the thought of a train movement ever entered his head.
Rooney Lee paused. In his hand he held a message. Rooney’s cheeks were hollow and his sunken eyes were large. His face, which was singularly a night face, would shock a stranger, but any man on the division would have given his life for Rooney. The simple fellow had but two living interests–his train-sheets and his chewing tobacco. Sometimes I think that every railroad man earns his salary–even the president. But Rooney was a Past Worthy Master in that unnumbered lodge of railroad slaves who do killing work and have left, when they die, only a little tobacco to show for it. It was on Rooney’s account that McCloud’s order banishing cuspidors from his office had been rescinded. A few evenings of agony on the despatcher’s part when in consultation with his chief, the mournful wandering of his uncomplaining eyes, his struggle to raise an obstinate window before he could answer a question, would have moved a heart harder than McCloud’s. The cuspidor had been restored to one corner of the large room, and to this corner Rooney, like a man with a jaw full of birdshot, always walked first. When he turned back to face his chief his face had lost its haunted expression, and he answered with solemn cheer, “On time,” or “Fourteen minutes late,” as the case might be. This night his face showed something out of the ordinary, and he faced McCloud with evident uneasiness. “Holy smoke, Mr. McCloud, here’s a ripper! We’ve lost Smoky Creek Bridge.”
“Lost Smoky Creek Bridge?” echoed McCloud, rising in amazement.
“Burned to-night. Seventy-seven was flagged by the man at the pump station.”
“That’s a tie-up for your life!” exclaimed McCloud, reaching for the message. “How could it catch fire? Is it burned up?”
“I can’t get anything on that yet; this came from Canby. I’ll have a good wire in a few minutes and get it all for you.”
“Have Phil Hailey and Hyde notified, Rooney, and Reed and Brill Young, and get up a train. Smoky Creek Bridge! By heavens, we are ripped up the back now! What can we do there, Rooney?” He was talking to himself. “There isn’t a thing for it on God’s earth but switchbacks and five-per-cent. grades down to the bottom of the creek and cribbing across it till the new line is ready. Wire Callahan and Morris Blood, and get everything you can for me before we start.”
Ten hours later and many hundreds of miles from the mountain division, President Bucks and a companion were riding in the peace of a June morning down the beautiful Mohawk Valley with an earlier and illustrious railroad man, William C. Brown. The three men were at breakfast in Brown’s car. A message was brought in for Bucks. He read it and passed it to his companion, Whispering Smith, who sat at Brown’s left hand. The message was from Callahan with the news of the burning of Smoky Creek Bridge. Details were few, because no one on the West End could suggest a plausible cause for the fire.
“What do you think of it, Gordon?” demanded Bucks bluntly.
Whispering Smith seemed at all times bordering on good-natured surprise, and in that normal condition he read Callahan’s message. Everything surprised Whispering Smith, even his salary; but an important consequence was that nothing excited him. He seemed to accommodate himself to the unexpected through habitual surprise. It showed markedly in his eyes, which were bright and quite wide open, and, save for his eyes, no feature about him would fix itself in the memory. His round, pleasant face, his heavy brown mustache, the medium build that concealed under its commonplace symmetry an unusual strength, his slightly rounding shoulders bespeaking a not too serious estimate of himself–every characteristic, even to his unobtrusive suit and black hat, made him distinctly an ordinary man–one to be met in the street to-day and passed, and forgotten to-morrow.
He was laughing under Bucks’s scrutiny when he handed the message back. “Why, I don’t know a thing about it, not a thing; but taking a long shot and speaking by and far, I should say it looks something like first blood for Sinclair,” he suggested, and to change the subject lifted his cup of coffee.
“Then it looks like you for the mountains to-night instead of for Weber and Fields’s,” retorted Bucks, reaching for a cigar. “Brown, why have you never learned to smoke?”
CHAPTER IX
THE MISUNDERSTANDING
No attempt was made to minimize the truth that the blow to the division was a staggering one. The loss of Smoky Creek Bridge put almost a thousand miles of the mountain division out of business. Perishable freight and time freight were diverted to other lines. Passengers were transferred; lunches were served to them in the deep valley, and they were supplied by an ingenuous advertising department with pictures of the historic bridge as it had long stood, and their addresses were taken with the promise of a picture of the ruins. Smoky Creek Bridge had long been famous in mountain song and story. For one generation of Western railroad men it had stood as a monument to the earliest effort to conquer the Rockies with a railroad. Built long before the days of steel, this high and slender link in the first transcontinental line had for thirty years served faithfully at its danger-post, only to fall in the end at the hands of a bridge assassin; nor has the mystery of its fate ever completely been solved, though it is believed to lie with Murray Sinclair in the Frenchman hills. The engineering department and the operating department united in a tremendous effort to bring about a resumption of traffic. Glover’s men, pulled off construction, were sent forward in trainloads. Dancing’s linemen strung arc-lights along the creek until the canyon twinkled at night like a mountain village, and men in three shifts worked elbow to elbow unceasingly to run the switchbacks down to the creek-bed. There, by cribbing across the bottom, they got in a temporary line.
Train movement was thrown into a spectacle of confusion. Upon the incessant and well-ordered activities of the road the burning of the bridge fell like the heel of a heavy boot on an ant-hill; but the railroad men like ants rose to the emergency, and, where the possible failed, achieved the impossible.
McCloud spent his days at the creek and his nights at Medicine Bend with his assistant and his chief despatcher, advising, counselling, studying out trouble reports, and steadying wherever he could the weakened lines of his operating forces. He was getting his first taste of the trials of the hardest-worked and poorest-paid man in the operating department of a railroad–the division superintendent.
To these were added personal annoyances. A trainload of Duck Bar steers, shipped by Lance Dunning from the Crawling Stone Ranch, had been caught west of the bridge the very night of the fire. They had been loaded at Tipton and shipped to catch a good market, and under extravagant promises from the live-stock agent of a quick run to Chicago. When Lance Dunning learned that his cattle had been caught west of the break and would have to be unloaded, he swore up a horse in hot haste and started for Medicine Bend. McCloud, who had not closed his eyes for sixty hours, had just got into Medicine Bend from Smoky Creek and was sitting at his desk buried in a mass of papers, but he ordered the cattleman admitted. He was, in fact, eager to meet the manager of the big ranch and the cousin of Dicksie. Lance Dunning stood above six feet in height, and was a handsome man, in spite of the hard lines around his eyes, as he walked in; but neither his manner nor his expression was amiable.
“Are you Mr. McCloud? I’ve been here three times this afternoon to see you,” said he, ignoring McCloud’s answer and a proffered chair. “This is your office, isn’t it?”
McCloud, a little surprised, answered again and civilly: “It certainly is; but I have been at Smoky Creek for two or three days.”
“What have you done with my cattle?”
“The Duck Bar train was run back to Point of Rocks and the cattle were unloaded at the yard.”
Lance Dunning spoke with increasing harshness: “By whose order was that done? Why wasn’t I notified? Have they had feed or water?”
“All the stock caught west of the bridge was sent back for feed and water by my orders. It has all been taken care of. You should have been notified, certainly; it is the business of the stock agent to see to that. Let me inquire about it while you are here, Mr. Dunning,” suggested McCloud, ringing for his clerk.
Dunning lost no time in expressing himself. “I don’t want my cattle held at Point of Rocks!” he said angrily. “Your Point of Rocks yards are infected. My cattle shouldn’t have been sent there.”
“Oh, no! The old yards where they had a touch of fever were burned off the face of the earth a year ago. The new yards are perfectly sanitary. The loss of the bridge has crippled us, you know. Your cattle are being well cared for, Mr. Dunning, and if you doubt it you may go up and give our men any orders you like in the matter at our expense.”
“You’re taking altogether too much on yourself when you run my stock over the country in this way,” exclaimed Dunning, refusing to be placated.
“How am I to get to Point of Rocks–walk there?”
“Not at all,” returned McCloud, ringing up his clerk and asking for a pass, which was brought back in a moment and handed to Dunning. “The cattle,” continued McCloud, “can be run down, unloaded, and driven around the break to-morrow–with the loss of only two days.”
“And in the meantime I lose my market.”
“It is too bad, certainly, but I suppose it will be several days before we can get a line across Smoky Creek.”
“Why weren’t the cattle sent through that way yesterday? What have they been held at Point of Rocks for? I call the thing badly managed.”
“We couldn’t get the empty cars up from Piedmont for the transfer until to-day; empties are very scarce everywhere now.”
“There always have been empties here when they were wanted until lately. There’s been no head or tail to anything on this division for six months.”
“I’m sorry that you have that impression.”
“That impression is very general,” declared the stockman, with an oath, “and if you keep on discharging the only men on this division that are competent to handle a break like this, it is likely to continue!”
“Just a moment!” McCloud’s finger rose pointedly. “My failure to please you in caring for your stock in an emergency may be properly a matter for comment; your opinion as to the way I am running this division is, of course, your own: but don’t attempt to criticise the retention or discharge of any man on my payroll!”
Dunning strode toward him. “I’m a shipper on this line; when it suits me to criticise you or your methods, or anybody else’s, I expect to do so,” he retorted in high tones.
“But you cannot tell me how to run my business!” thundered McCloud, leaning over the table in front of him.
As the two men glared at each other Rooney Lee opened the door. His surprise at the situation amounted to consternation. He shuffled to the corner of the room, and while McCloud and Dunning engaged hotly again, Rooney, from the corner, threw a shot of his own into the quarrel. “On time!” he roared.
The angry men turned. “What’s on time?” asked McCloud curtly.
“Number One; she’s in and changing engines. I told them you were going West,” declared Rooney in so deep tones that his fiction would never have been suspected. If his cue had been, “My lord, the conductor waits,” it could not have been rung in more opportunely.
Dunning, to emphasize, without a further word, his disgust for the situation and his contempt for the management, tore into scraps the pass that had been given him, threw the scraps on the floor, took a cigar from his pocket and lighted it; insolence could do no more.
McCloud looked over at the despatcher. “No, I am not going West, Rooney. But if you will be good enough to stay here and find out from this man just how this railroad ought to be run, I will go to bed. He can tell you; the microbe seems to be working in his mind right now,” said McCloud, slamming down the roll-top of his desk. And with Lance Dunning glaring at him, somewhat speechless, he put on his hat and walked out of the room.
It was but one of many disagreeable incidents due to the loss of the bridge. Complications arising from the tie-up followed him at every turn. It seemed as if he could not get away from trouble following trouble. After forty hours further of toil, relieved by four hours of sleep, McCloud found himself, rather dead than alive, back at Medicine Bend and in the little dining-room at Marion’s. Coming in at the cottage door on Fort Street, he dropped into a chair. The cottage rooms were empty. He heard Marion’s voice in the front shop; she was engaged with a customer. Putting his head on the table to wait a moment, nature asserted itself and McCloud fell asleep. He woke hearing a voice that he had heard in dreams. Perhaps no other voice could have wakened him, for he slept for a few minutes a death-like sleep. At all events, Dicksie Dunning was in the front room and McCloud heard her. She was talking with Marion about the burning of Smoky Creek Bridge.
“Every one is talking about it yet,” Dicksie was saying. “If I had lost my best friend I couldn’t have felt worse; you know, my father built it. I rode over there the day of the fire, and down into the creek, so I could look up where it stood. I never realized before how high and how long it was; and when I remembered how proud father always was of his work there–Cousin Lance has often told me–I sat down right on the ground and cried. Really, the ruins were the most pathetic thing you ever saw, Marion, with great clouds of smoke rolling up from the canyon that day; the place looked so lonely when I rode away that every time I turned to look back my eyes filled with tears. Poor daddy! I am almost glad he didn’t live to see it. How times have changed in railroading, haven’t they? Mr. Sinclair was over just the other night, and he said if they kept using this new coal in the engines they would burn up everything on the division. Do you know, I have been waiting in town three or four hours now for Cousin Lance? I feel almost like a tramp. He is coming from the West with the stock train. It was due here hours ago, but they never seem to know when anything is to get here the way things are run on the railroad now. I want to give Cousin Lance some mail before he goes through.”
“The passenger trains crossed the creek over the switchbacks hours ago, and they say the emergency grades are first-rate,” said Marion Sinclair, on the defensive. “The stock trains must have followed right along. Your cousin is sure to be here pretty soon. Probably Mr. McCloud will know which train he is on, and Mr. Lee telephoned that Mr. McCloud would be over here at three o’clock for his dinner. He ought to be here now.”
“Oh, dear, then I must go!”
“But he can probably tell you just when your cousin will be in.”
“I wouldn’t meet him for worlds!”
“You wouldn’t? Why, Mr. McCloud is delightful.”
“Oh, not for worlds, Marion! You know he is discharging all the best of the older men, the men that have made the road everything it is, and of course we can’t help sympathizing with them over our way. For my part, I think it is terrible, after a man has given all of his life to building up a railroad, that he should be thrown out to starve in that way by new managers, Marion.”
McCloud felt himself shrinking within his weary clothes. Resentment seemed to have died. He felt too exhausted to undertake controversy, even if it were to be thought of, and it was not.
Nothing further was needed to complete his humiliation. He picked up his hat and with the thought of getting out as quietly as he had come in. In rising he swept a tumbler at his elbow from the table. The glass broke on the floor, and Marion exclaimed, “What is that?” and started for the dining-room.
It was too late to get away. McCloud stepped to the portières of the trimming-room door and pushed them aside. Marion stood with a hat in her hand, and Dicksie, sitting at the table, was looking directly at the intruder as he appeared in the doorway. She saw in him her pleasant acquaintance of the wreck at Smoky Creek, whose name she had not learned. In her surprise she rose to her feet, and Marion spoke quickly: “Oh, Mr. McCloud, is it you? I did not hear you come in.”
Dicksie’s face, which had lighted, became a spectacle of confusion after she heard the name. McCloud, conscious of the awkwardness of his position and the disorder of his garb, said the worst thing at once: “I fear I am inadvertently overhearing your conversation.”