Whispering Smith/Chapter 39
CHAPTER XXXIX
AMONG THE COYOTES
OROVILLE once marked farthest north for the Peace River gold camps, but with mining long ago abandoned it now marks farthest south for a rustler’s camp, being a favorite resort for the people of the Williams Cache country. Oroville boasts that it has never surrendered and that it has never been cleaned out. It has moved, and been moved, up stream and down, and from bank to bank; it has been burned out and blown away and lived on wheels: but it has never suffered the loss of its identity. Oroville is said to have given to its river the name of Peace River—either wholly in irony or because in Oroville there was for many years no peace save in the river. However, that day, too, is past, and Peace County has its sheriff and a few people who are not habitually “wanted.”
Whispering Smith, well dusted with alkali, rode up to the Johnson ranch, eight miles southwest of Oroville, in the afternoon of the day after he left Medicine Bend. The ranch lies in a valley watered by the Rainbow, and makes a pretty little oasis of green in a limitless waste of sagebrush. Gene and Bob Johnson were cutting alfalfa when Whispering Smith rode into the field, and, stopping the mowers, the three men talked while the seven horses nibbled the clover.
“I may need a little help, Gene, to get him out of town,” remarked Smith, after he had told his story; “that is, if there are too many Cache men there for me.”
Bob Johnson was stripping a stalk of alfalfa in his fingers. “Them fellows are pretty sore.”
“That comes of half doing a job, Bob. I was in too much of a hurry with the round-up. They haven’t had dose enough yet,” returned Whispering Smith. “If you and Gene will join me sometime when I have a week to spare, we will go in there, clean up the gang and burn the hair off the roots of the chapparal—what? I’ve hinted to Rebstock he could get ready for something like that.”
“Tell us about that fight, Gordon.”
“I will if you will give me something to eat and have this horse taken care of. Then, Bob, I want you to ride into Oroville and reconnoitre. This is mail day and I understand some of the boys are buying postage stamps to put on my coffin.”
They went to the house, where Whispering Smith talked as he ate. Bob took a horse and rode away, and Gene, with his guest, went back to the alfalfa, where Smith took Bob’s place on the mower. When they saw Bob riding up the valley, Whispering Smith, bringing in the machine, mounted his horse.
“Your man is there all right,” said Bob, as he approached. “He and John Rebstock were in the Blackbird saloon. Seagrue isn’t there, but Barney Rebstock and a lot of others are. I talked a few minutes with John and Murray. Sinclair didn’t say much; only that the railroad gang was trying to run him out of the country, and he wanted to meet a few of them before he went. I just imagined he held up a little before me; maybe not. There’s a dozen Williams Cache men in town.”
“But those fellows are not really dangerous, Bob, though they may be troublesome,” observed Smith reflectively.
“Well, what’s your plan?” blurted Gene Johnson.
“I haven’t any, Gene,” returned Smith, with perfect simplicity. “My only plan is to ride into town and serve my papers, if I can. I’ve got a deputyship—and that I’m going to do right away. If you, Bob, or both of you, will happen in about thirty minutes later you’ll get the news and perhaps see the fun. Much obliged for your feed, Gene; come down to Medicine Bend any time and I’ll fill you up. I want you both for the elk hunt next fall, remember that. Bucks is coming, and is going to bring Brown and Henson and perhaps Atterbury and Gibbs and some New Yorkers; and McCloud’s brother, the preacher, is coming out and they are all right—all of them.”
The only street in Oroville faces the river, and the buildings string for two or three blocks along modest bluffs. Not a soul was anywhere in sight when Whispering Smith rode into town, save that across the street from where he dismounted and tied his horse three men stood in front of the Blackbird.
They watched the new arrival with languid interest. Smith walked stiffly over toward the saloon to size up the men before he should enter it. The middle man of the group, with a thin red face and very blue eyes, was chewing tobacco in an unpromising way. Before Smith was half-way across the street he saw the hands of the three men falling to their hips. Taking care, however, only to keep the men between him and the saloon door, Smith walked directly toward them. “Boys, have you happened to see Gene or Bob Johnson to-day, any of you?” He threw back the brim of his Stetson as he spoke.
“Hold your hand right there—right where it is,” said the blue-eyed man sharply.
Whispering Smith smiled, but held his hand rather awkwardly upon his hat-brim.
“No,” continued the spokesman, “we ain’t none of us happened to see Bob or Gene Johnson to-day; but we happen to seen Whispering Smith, and we’ll blow your face off if you move it an inch.”
Smith laughed. “I never quarrel with a man that’s got the drop on me, boys. Now, this is sudden but unexpected. Do I know any of you?” He looked from one face to another before him, with a wide reach in his field of vision for the three hands that were fast on three pistol-butts. “Hold on! I’ve met you somewhere,” he said with easy confidence to the blue-eyed man with the weather-split lip. “Williams Cache, wasn’t it? All right, we’re placed. Now what have you got in for me?”
“I’ve got forty head of steers in for you,” answered the man in the middle, with a splitting oath. “You stole forty head of my steers in that round-up, and I’m going to fill you so full of lead you’ll never run off no more stock for nobody. Don’t look over there to your horse or your rifle. Hold your hands right where they are.”
“Certainly, certainly!”
“When I pull, I shoot!”
“I don’t always do it, but it is business, I acknowledge. When a man pulls he ought to shoot—very often it’s the only chance he ever gets to shoot. Well, it isn’t every man gets the drop on me that easy, but you boys have got it,” continued Whispering Smith in frank admiration. “Only I want to say you’re after the wrong man. That round-up was all Rebstock’s fault, and Rebstock is bound to make good all loss and damage.”
“You’ll make good my share of it right now and here,” said the man with the wash-blue eyes.
“Why, of course,” assented Whispering Smith, “if I must, I must. I suppose I may light a cigarette, boys, before you turn loose the fireworks?”
“Light it quick!”
Laughing at the humor of the situation, Whispering Smith, his eyes beaming with good-nature, put the finger and thumb of his right hand into his waistcoat pocket, drew out a package of cigarette paper, and, bantering his captors innocently the while, tore out a sheet and put the packet back. Folding the paper in his two hands, he declared he believed his tobacco was in his saddle-pocket, and asked leave to step across the street to get it. The trick was too transparent, and leave was refused with scorn and some hard words. Whispering Smith begged the men in front of him in turn for tobacco. They cursed him and shook their heads.
For an instant he looked troubled. Still appealing to them with his eyes, he tapped lightly the lower outside pockets of his coat with his fingers, shifting the cigarette paper from hand to hand as he hunted. The outside pockets seemed empty. But as he tapped the inside breast pocket on the left side of the coat—the three men, lynx-eyed, watching—his face brightened. “Stop!” said he, his voice sinking to a relieved whisper as his hand rested lightly on the treasure. “There’s the tobacco. I suppose one of you will give me a match?”
All that the three before him could ever afterward recollect—and for several years afterward they cudgelled their brains pretty thoroughly about that moment—was that Whispering Smith took hold of the left lapel of his coat to take the tobacco out of the breast pocket. An excuse to take that lapel in his left hand was, in fact, all that Whispering Smith needed to put not alone the three men before him but all Oroville at his mercy. The play of his right hand in crossing the corduroy waistcoat to pull his revolver from its scabbard and throw it into their faces was all too quick for better eyes than theirs. They saw only the muzzle of the heavy Colt’s playing like a snake’s tongue under their surprised noses, with the good-natured smile still behind it. “Or will one of you roll a cigarette?” asked Whispering Smith, without a break between the two questions. “I don’t smoke. Now don’t make faces; go right ahead. Do anything you want to with your hands. I wouldn’t ask a man to keep his hands or feet still on a hot day like this,” he insisted, the revolver playing all the time. “You won’t draw? You won’t fight? Pshaw! Then disengage your hands gently from your guns. You fellows really ought not to attempt to pull a gun in Oroville, and I will tell you why—there’s a reason for it.” He looked confidential as he put his head forward to whisper among the crestfallen faces. “At this altitude it is too fast work. I know you now,” he went on as they continued to wilt. “You are Fatty Filber,” he said to the thin chap. “Don’t work your mouth like that at me; don’t do it. You seem surprised. Really, have you the asthma? Get over it, because you are wanted in Pound County for horse-stealing. Why, hang it, Fatty, you’re good for ten years, and of course, since you have reminded me of it, I’ll see that you get it. And you, Baxter,” said he to the man on the right, “I know I spoke to you once when I was inspector about altering brands; that’s five years, you know. You,” he added, scrutinizing the third man to scare him to death—“I think you were at Tower W. No? No matter; you two boys may go, anyway. Fatty, you stay; we’ll put some state cow on your ribs. By the way, are you a detective, Fatty? Aren’t you? See here! I can get you into an association. For ten dollars, they give you a German-silver star, and teach the Japanese method of pulling, by correspondence. Or you might get an electric battery to handle your gun with. You can get pocket dynamos from the mail-order houses. Sure! Read the big book!”
When Gene and Bob Johnson rode into town, Whispering Smith was sitting in a chair outside the Blackbird, still chatting with Filber, who stood with his arms around a hitching-post, holding fast a mail-order house catalogue. A modest crowd of hangers-on had gathered.
“Here we are, Gene,” exclaimed Smith to the deputy sheriff. “I was looking for steers, but some calves got into the drive. Take him away.”
While the Johnsons were laughing, Smith walked into the Blackbird. He had lost thirty minutes, and in losing them had lost his quarry. Sinclair had disappeared, and Whispering Smith made a virtue of necessity by taking the upsetting of his plans with an unruffled face. There was but one thing more, indeed, to do, and that was to eat his supper and ride away. The street encounter had made so much talk in Oroville that Smith declined Gene Johnson’s invitation to go back to the house. It seemed a convenient time to let any other ambitious rustlers make good if they were disposed to try, and Whispering Smith went for his supper to the hotel where the Williams Cache men made their headquarters.
There was a rise in the atmospheric pressure the moment he entered the hotel office door, and when he walked into the dining-room, some minutes later, the silence was oppressive. Smith looked for a seat. The only vacant place chanced to be at a table where nine men from the Cache sat busy with ham and eggs. It was a trifle awkward, but the only thing to do was to take the vacant chair.
The nine men were actively engaged with knives and forks and spoons when Whispering Smith drew out the empty chair at the head of the table; but nine pairs of hands dropped modestly under the table when he sat down. Coughing slightly to hide his embarrassment and to keep his right hand in touch with his necktie, Whispering Smith looked around the table with the restrained air of a man who has bowed his head and resolved to ask the blessing, but wants to make reasonably sure that the family is listening. A movement at the other tables, among the regular boarders of the hostelry, was apparent almost at once. Appetites began to fail all over the dining-room. Whispering Smith gave his order genially to the confused waitress: “Bring me two eggs—one fried on one side and one on the other—and coffee.”
There was a general scraping of chairs on the floor as they were pushed back and guests not at the moment interested in the bill of fare started, modestly but firmly, to leave the dining-room. At Whispering Smith’s table there were no second calls for coffee. To stimulate the eating he turned the conversation into channels as reassuring as possible. Unfortunately for his endeavor, the man at the far end of the table reached for a toothpick. It seemed a pleasant way out of the difficulty, and when the run on toothpicks had once begun, all Whispering Smith’s cordiality could not check it. Every man appeared to want a toothpick, and one after another of Whispering Smith’s company deserted him. He was finally left alone with a physician known as “Doc,” a forger and a bigamist from Denver. Smith tried to engage Doc in medical topics. The doctor was not alone frightened but tipsy, and when Smith went so far as to ask him, as a medical man, whether in his opinion the high water in the mountains had any direct connection with the prevalence of falling of the spine among old “residenters” in Williams Cache, the doctor felt of his head as if his brain were turning turtle.
When Whispering Smith raised his knife ostentatiously to bring out a feature of his theory, the doctor raised his knife higher to admit the force of it; and when Whispering Smith leaned his head forward impressively to drive home a point in his assertion, the doctor stretched his neck till his face grew apoplectic. Releasing him at length from the strain, Whispering Smith begged of the staring maid-servant the recipe for the biscuit. When she came back with it he sat all alone, pouring catsup over his griddle-cakes in an abstracted manner, and it so flurried her that she had to go out again to ask whether the gasolene went into the dough or under it.
He played out the play to the end, but when he rode away in the dusk his face was careworn. John Rebstock had told him why Sinclair dodged: there were others whom Sinclair wanted to meet first; and Whispering Smith was again heading on a long, hard ride, and after a man on a better horse, back to the Crawling Stone and Medicine Bend. “There’s others he wants to see first or you’d have no trouble in talking business to-day. You nor no other man will ever get him alive.” But Whispering Smith knew that.
“See that he doesn’t get you alive, Rebstock,” was his parting retort. “If he finds out Kennedy has got the Tower W money, the first thing he does will be to put the Doxology all over you.”