Whispering Smith/Chapter 42
CHAPTER XLII
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.”