Whispering Smith/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII
A TEST
DU SANG had the sidewise gait of a wolf, and crossed the street with the choppy walk of the man out of a long saddle. Being both uncertain and quick, he was a man to slip a trail easily. He travelled around the block and disappeared among the many open doors that blazed along Hill Street. Less alert trailers than the two behind him would have been at fault; but when he entered the place he was looking for, Kennedy was so close that Du Sang could have spoken to him had he turned around.
Kennedy passed directly ahead. A moment later Whispering Smith put his head inside the door of the joint Du Sang had entered, withdrew it, and, rejoining his companions, spoke in an undertone: “A negro dive; he’s lying low. Now we will keep our regular order. It’s a half-basement, with a bar on the left; crap games at the table behind the screen on the right. Kennedy, will you take the rear end of the bar? It covers the whole room and the back door. George, pass in ahead of me and step just to the left of the slot machine; you’ve got the front door there and everything behind the screen, and I can get close to Du Sang. Look for a thinnish, yellow-faced man with a brown hat and a brown shirt—and pink eyes—shooting craps under this window. I’ll shoot craps with him. Is your heart pumping, George? Never mind, this is easy! Farrell, you’re first!”
The dive, badly lighted and ventilated, was counted tough among tough places. White men and colored mixed before the bar and about the tables. When Smith stepped around the screen and into the flare of the hanging lamps, Du Sang stood in the small corner below the screened street window. McCloud, though vitally interested in looking at the man that had come to town to kill him, felt his attention continually wandering back to Whispering Smith. The clatter of the rolling dice, the guttural jargon of the negro gamblers, the drift of men to and from the bar, and the clouds of tobacco smoke made a hazy background for the stoop-shouldered man with his gray hat and shabby coat, dust-covered and travel-stained. Industriously licking the broken wrapper of a cheap cigar and rolling it fondly under his forefinger, he was making his way unostentatiously toward Du Sang. Thirty-odd men were in the saloon, but only two knew what the storm centre moving slowly across the room might develop. Kennedy, seeing everything and talking pleasantly with one of the barkeepers, his close-set teeth gleaming twenty feet away, stood at the end of the bar sliding an empty glass between his hands. Whispering Smith pushed past the on-lookers to get to the end of the table where Du Sang was shooting. He made no effort to attract Du Sang’s attention, and when the latter looked up he could have pulled the gray hat from the head of the man whose brown eyes were mildly fixed on Du Sang’s dice; they were lying just in front of Smith. Looking indifferently at the intruder, Du Sang reached for the dice: just ahead of his right hand, Whispering Smith’s right hand, the finger-tips extended on the table, rested in front of them; it might have been through accident or it might have been through design. In his left hand Smith held the broken cigar, and without looking at Du Sang he passed the wrapper again over the tip of his tongue and slowly across his lips.
Du Sang now looked sharply at him, and Smith looked at his cigar. Others were playing around the semicircular table—it might mean nothing. Du Sang waited. Smith lifted his right hand from the table and felt in his waistcoat for a match. Du Sang, however, made no effort to take up the dice. He watched Whispering Smith scratch a match on the table, and, either because it failed to light or through design, it was scratched the second time on the table, marking a cross between the two dice.
The meanest negro in the joint would not have stood that, yet Du Sang hesitated. Whispering Smith, mildly surprised, looked up. “Hello, Pearline! You shooting here?” He pushed the dice back toward the outlaw. “Shoot again!”
Du Sang, scowling, snapped the dice and threw badly.
“Up jump the devil, is it? Shoot again!” And, pushing back the dice, Smith moved closer to Du Sang. The two men touched arms. Du Sang, threatened in a way wholly new to him, waited like a snake braved by a mysterious enemy. His eyes blinked like a badger’s. He caught up the dice and threw. “Is that the best you can do?” asked Smith. “See here!” He took up the dice. “Shoot with me!” Smith threw the dice up the table toward Du Sang. Once he threw craps, but, reaching directly in front of Du Sang, he picked the dice up and threw eleven. “Shoot with me, Du Sang.”
“What’s your game?” snapped Du Sang, with an oath.
“What do you care, if I’ve got the coin? I’ll throw you for twenty-dollar gold pieces.”
Du Sang’s eyes glittered. Unable to understand the reason for the affront, he stood like a cat waiting to spring. “This is my game!” he snarled.
“Then play it.”
“Look here, what do you want?” he demanded angrily.
Smith stepped closer. “Any game you’ve got. I’ll throw you left-handed, Du Sang.” With his right hand he snapped the dice under Du Sang’s nose and looked squarely into his eyes. “Got any Sugar Buttes money?”
Du Sang for an instant looked keenly back; his eyes contracted in that time to a mere narrow slit; then, sudden as thought, he sprang back into the corner. He knew now. This was the man who held the aces at the barbecue, the railroad man—Whispering Smith. Kennedy, directly across the table, watched the lightning-like move. For the first time the crap-dealer looked impatiently up.
It was a showdown. No one watching the two men under the window breathed for a moment. Whispering Smith, motionless, only watched the half-closed eyes. “You can’t shoot craps,” he said coldly. “What can you shoot, Pearline? You can’t stop a man on horseback.”
Du Sang knew he must try for a quick kill or make a retreat. He took in the field at a glance. Kennedy’s teeth gleamed only ten feet away, and with his right hand half under his coat lapel he toyed with his watch-chain. McCloud had moved in from the slot machine and stood at the point of the table, looking at Du Sang and laughing at him. Whispering Smith threw off all pretence. “Take your hand away from your gun, you albino! I’ll blow your head off left-handed if you pull! Will you get out of this town to-night? If you can’t drop a man in the saddle at two hundred and fifty yards, what do you think you’d look like after a break with me? Go back to the whelp that hired you, and tell him when he wants a friend of mine to send a man that can shoot. If you are within twenty miles of Medicine Bend at daylight I’ll rope you like a fat cow and drag you down Front Street!”
Du Sang, with burning eyes, shrank narrower and smaller into his corner, ready to shoot if he had to, but not liking the chances. No man in Williams Cache could pull or shoot with Du Sang, but no man in the mountains had ever drawn successfully against the man that faced him.
Whispering Smith saw that he would not draw. He taunted him again in low tones, and, backing away, spoke laughingly to McCloud. While Kennedy covered the corner, Smith backed to the door and waited for the two to join him. They halted a moment at the door, then they backed slowly up the steps and out into the street.
There was no talk till they reached the Wickiup office. “Now, will some of you tell me who Du Sang is?” asked McCloud, after Kennedy and Whispering Smith with banter and laughing had gone over the scene.
Kennedy picked up the ruler. “The wickedest, cruelest man in the bunch—and the best shot.”
“Where is your hat, George—the one he put the bullet through?” asked Whispering Smith, limp in the big chair. “Burn it up; he thinks he missed you. Burn it up now. Never let him find out what a close call you had. Du Sang! Yes, he is cold-blooded as a wild-cat and cruel as a soft bullet. Du Sang would shoot a dying man, George, just to keep him squirming in the dirt. Did you ever see such eyes in a human being, set like that and blinking so in the light? It’s bad enough to watch a man when you can see his eyes. Here’s hoping we’re done with him!”