Whispering Smith/Chapter 25
CHAPTER XXV
THE MAN ON THE FRENCHMAN
SINCLAIR'S place on the Frenchman backed up on a sharp rise against the foothills of the Bridger range, and the ranch buildings were strung along the creek. The ranch-house stood on ground high enough to command the country for miles up and down the valley.
Only two roads lead from Medicine Bend and the south into the Frenchman country: one a wagon-road following Smoky Creek and running through Dale Canyon; the other a pack-road, known as the Gridley trail, crossing the Topah Topah Hills and making a short cut from the Dunning ranch on the Crawling Stone to the Frenchman. The entire valley is, in fact, so difficult of access, save by the long and roundabout wagon-road, that the sight of a complete outfit of buildings such as that put up by Sinclair always came as a surprise to the traveller who, reaching the crest of the hills, looked suddenly down a thousand feet on his well-ordered sheds and barns and corrals.
The rider who reaches the Topah Topah crest on the Gridley trail now sees in the valley below only traces of what was so laboriously planned and perfectly maintained a few years ago. But even the ruins left on the Frenchman show the herculean labor undertaken by the man in setting up a comfortable and even an elaborate establishment in so inaccessible a spot. His defiance of all ordinary means of doing things was shown in his preference for bringing much of his building-material over the trail instead of around by the Smoky Creek road. A good part of the lumber that went into his house was packed over the Gridley trail. His piano was brought through the canyon on a wagon, but the mechanical player for the piano and his wagons themselves were packed over the trail on the backs of mules. A heavy steel range for the kitchen had been brought over the same way. For Sinclair no work was hard enough, none went fast enough, and revelry never rose high enough. During the time of his activity in the Frenchman Valley Sinclair had the best-appointed place between Williams Cache and the Crawling Stone, and in the Crawling Stone only the Dunning ranch would bear comparison with his own. On the Frenchman Sinclair kept an establishment the fame of which is still foremost in mountain story. Here his cows ranged the canyons and the hills for miles, and his horses were known from Medicine Bend to Fort Tracy. Here he rallied his men, laid snares for his enemies, dispensed a reckless hospitality, ruled his men with an oath and a blow, and carried a six-shooter to explain orders and answer questions with.
Over the Gridley trail from the Crawling Stone Marion and Dicksie Dunning rode early in the morning the day after McCloud and his men left the Stone Ranch with their work done. The trail is a good three hours long, and they reached Sinclair’s place at about ten o’clock. He was waiting for Marion—she had sent word she should come—and he came out of the front door into the sunshine with a smile of welcome when he saw Dicksie with her. Dicksie, long an admirer of Sinclair’s, as women usually were, had recast somewhat violently her opinions of him. She faced him now with a criminal consciousness that she knew too much. The weight of the dreadful secret weighed on her, and her responsibility in the issue of the day ahead did not help to make her greeting an easy one. One thing only was fixed in her mind and reflected in the tension of her lips and her eyes: the resolve to keep at every cost the promise she had given. For Dicksie had fallen under the spell of a man even more compelling than Sinclair, and felt strangely bounden to what she had said.
Sinclair, however, had spirit enough to smooth quite away every embarrassment. “Bachelor’s quarters,” he explained roughly and pleasantly, as he led the two women toward the house. “Cowmen make poor housekeepers, but you must feel at home.” And when Dicksie, looking at his Indian rugs on the floors, the walls, and the couches, said she thought he had little to apologize for, Sinclair looked gratified and took off his hat again. “Just a moment,” he said, standing at the side of the door. “I’ve never been able to get Marion over here before, so it happens that a woman’s foot has never entered the new house. I want to watch one of you cross the threshold for the first time.”
Dicksie, moving ahead, retreated with a laugh. “You first, then, Marion.”
“No, Dicksie, you.”
“Never! you first.” So Marion, quite red and wretchedly ill at ease, walked into the ranch-house first.
Sinclair shone nowhere better than as a host. When he had placed his guests comfortably in the living-room he told them the story of the building of the house. Then he made a cicerone of himself, and explained, with running comments, each feature of his plan as he showed how it had been carried out through the various rooms. Surprised at the attractiveness of things, Dicksie found herself making mental notes for her own use, and began asking questions. Sinclair was superb in answering, but the danger of admiring things became at once apparent, for when Dicksie exclaimed over a handsome bearskin, a rich dark brown grizzly-skin of unusual size, Sinclair told the story of the killing, bared his tremendous forearm to show where the polished claws had ripped him, and, disregarding Dicksie’s protests, insisted on sending the skin over to Crawling Stone Ranch as a souvenir of her visit.
“I live a great deal alone over here,” he said, waving Dicksie’s continued refusal magnificently aside as he moved into the next room. “I’ve got a few good dogs, and I hunt just enough to keep my hand in with a rifle.” Dicksie quailed a little at the smile that went with the words. “The men, at least the kind I mix with, don’t care for grizzly-skins, and to enjoy anything you’ve got to have sympathetic company—don’t you know that?” he asked, looking admiringly at Dicksie. “I’ve got another skin for you—a silver-tip,” he added in deep, gentle tones, addressing Marion. “It has a fine head, as fine as I ever saw in the Smithsonian. It is down at Medicine Bend now, being dressed and mounted. By the way, I’ve forgotten to ask you, Miss Dicksie, about the high water. How did you get through at the ranch?”
Dicksie, sitting on the piano-bench, looked up with resolution. “Bravely!” she exclaimed. “Mr. McCloud came to our rescue with bags and mattresses and a hundred men, and he has put in a revetement a thousand feet long. Oh, we are regular river experts at our house now! Had you any trouble here, Mr. Sinclair?”
“No, the Frenchman behaves pretty well in the rock. We had forty feet of water here one day, though; forty feet, that’s right. McCloud, yes; able fellow, I guess, too, though he and I don’t hit it off.” Sinclair sat back in his chair, and as he spoke he spoke magnanimously. “He doesn’t like me, but that is no fault of his; railroad men, and good ones, too, sometimes get started wrong with one another. Well, I’m glad he took care of you. Try that piano, Miss Dicksie, will you? I don’t know much about pianos, but that ought to be a good one. I would wheel the player over for you, but any one that plays as beautifully as you do ought not to be allowed to use a player. Marion, I want to talk a few minutes with you, may I? Do you mind going out under the cottonwood?”
Dicksie’s heart jumped. “Don’t be gone long, Marion,” she exclaimed impulsively, “for you know, Mr. Sinclair, we must get back by two o’clock.” And Dicksie, pale with apprehension, looked at them both. Marion, quite composed, nodded reassuringly and followed Sinclair out of doors into the sunshine.
For a few minutes Dicksie fingered wildly on the piano at some half-forgotten air, and in a fever of excitement walked out on the porch to see where they were. To her relief, she saw Marion sitting near Sinclair under the big tree in front of the house, where the horses stood. Dicksie, with her hands on her girdle, walked forlornly back and forth, hummed a tune, sat down in a rocking-chair, fanned herself, rose, walked back and forth again, and reflected that she was perfectly helpless, and that Sinclair might kill Marion a hundred times before she could reach her. And the thought that Marion was perhaps wholly unconscious of danger increased her anxiety.
She sat down in despair. How could Whispering Smith have allowed any one he had a care for to be exposed in this dreadful way? Trying to think what to do, Dicksie hurried back into the living-room, walked to the piano, took the pile of sheet-music from the top, and sat down to thumb it over. She threw song after song on the chair beside her. They were sheets of gaudy coon songs and ragtime with flaring covers, and they seemed to give off odors of cheap perfume. Dicksie hardly saw the titles as she passed them over, but of a sudden she stopped. Between two sheets of the music lay a small handkerchief. It was mussed, and in the corner of it “Nellie” was written conspicuously in a laundry mark. The odor of musk became in an instant sickening. Dicksie threw the music disdainfully aside, and sprang up with a flushed face to leave the room. Sinclair’s remark about the first woman to cross his threshold came back to her. From that moment Dicksie hated him. But no sooner had she seated herself on the porch than she remembered she had left her hat in the house, and rose to go in after it. She was resolved not to leave it under the roof another moment, and she had resolved to go over and wait where her horse was tied. As she reëntered the doorway she stopped. In the room she had just left a cowboy sat at the table, taking apart a revolver to clean it. The revolver was spread in its parts before him, but across the table lay a rifle. The man had not been in the room when she left it a moment before.
Dicksie passed behind him. He paid no attention to her; he had not looked up when she entered the room. Passing behind him once more to go out, Dicksie looked through the open window before which he sat. Sinclair and Marion sitting under the cottonwood tree were in plain sight, and the muzzle of the rifle where it lay covered them. Dicksie thrilled, but the man was busy with his work. Breathing deeply, she walked out on the porch again. Sinclair, she thought, was looking straight at her, and in her anxiety to appear unconscious she turned, walked to the end of the house, and at the corner almost ran into a man sitting out of doors in the shade mending a saddle. He had removed his belt to work, and his revolver lay in the holster on the bench, its grip just within reach of his hand. Dicksie walked in front of him, but he did not look up. She turned as if changing her mind, and with a little flirt of her riding-skirt sat down in the porch chair, feeling a faint moisture upon her forehead.
“I am going to leave this country, Marion,” Sinclair was saying. “There’s nothing here for me; I can see that. What’s the use of my eating my heart out over the way I’ve been treated? I’ve given the best years of my life to this railroad, and now they turn me down with a kick and a curse. It’s the old story of the Indian and his dog, only I don’t propose to let them make soup of me. I’m going to the coast, Marion. I’m going to California, where I wanted to go when we were married, and I wish to God we had gone there then. All our troubles might never have been if I had got in with a different crowd from these cow-boozers on the start. And, Marion, I want to know whether you’ll give me another chance and go with me.”
Sinclair, on the bench and leaning against the tree, sat with folded arms looking at his wife. Marion in a hickory chair faced him.
“No one would like to see you be all you ought to be more than I, Murray; but you are the only one in the world that can ever give yourself another chance to be that.”
“The fellows in the saddle here now have denied me every chance to make a man of myself again on the railroad—you know that, Marion. In fact, they never did give me the show I was entitled to. I ought to have had Hailey’s place. Bucks never treated me right in that; he never pushed me in the way he pushed other men that were just as bad as I ever was. It discouraged me; that’s the reason I went to pieces.”
“It could be no reason for treating me as you treated me: for bringing drunken men and drunken women into our house, and driving me out of it unless I would be what you were and what they were.”
“I know I haven’t treated you right; I’ve treated you shamefully. I will do anything on earth you say to square it. I will! Recollect, I had lived among men and in the same country with women like that for years before I knew you. I didn’t know how to treat you; I admit it. Give me another chance, Marion.”
“I gave you all that I had when I married you, Murray. I haven’t anything more to give to any man. You would be disappointed in me if I could ever live with you again, and I could not do that without living a lie every day.”
He bent forward, looking at the ground. He talked of their first meeting in Wisconsin; of the happiness of their little courtship; he brought up California again, and the Northwest coast, where, he told her, a great railroad was to be built and he should find the chance he needed to make a record for himself—it had been promised him—a chance to be the man his abilities entitled him to be in railroading. “And I’ve got a customer for the ranch and the cows, Marion. I don’t care for this business—damn the cows! let somebody else chase after ’em through the sleet. I’ve done well; I’ve made money—a lot of money—the last two years in my cattle deals, and I’ve got it put away, Marion; you need never lift your hand to work in our house again. We can live in California, and live well, under our own orange trees, whether I work or not. All I want to know is, will you go with me?”
“No! I will not go with you, Murray.”
He moved in his seat and threw his head up appealingly. “Why not?”
“I will never be dishonest with you; I never have been and I never will be. I have nothing in my heart to give you, and I will not live upon your money. I am earning my own living. I am as content as I ever can be, and I shall stay where I am and do what I am doing till I die, probably. And this is why I came when you asked me to; to tell you the exact truth. I am not a girl any longer—I never can be again. I am a woman. What I was before I married you I never can be again, and you have no right to ask me to be a hypocrite and say I can love you—for that is what it all comes to—when I have no such thing in my heart or life for you. It is dead and gone, and I cannot help it.”
“That sounds pretty hard, Marion.”
“It is only the truth. It sounded fearfully hard to me when you told me that woman was your friend—that you knew her before you knew me and would know her after I was dead; that she was as good as I, and that if I didn’t entertain her you would. But it was the truth; you told me the truth, and it was better that you told it—as it is better now that I tell it to you.”
“I was drunk. I didn’t tell you the truth. A man is a pretty tough animal sometimes, but you are a woman and a pure one, and I care more for you than for all the other women in the world, and it is not your nature to be unforgiving.”
“It is to be honest.”
He looked suddenly up at her and spoke sharply: “Marion, I know why you won’t go.”
“I have honestly told you.”
“No; you have not honestly told me. The real reason is Gordon Smith.”
“If he were I should not hesitate to tell you, Murray, but he is not,” she said coldly.
Sinclair spoke harshly: “Do you think you can fool me? Don’t you suppose I know he spends his time loafing around your shop?”
Marion flushed indignantly. “It is not true!”
“Don’t you suppose I know he writes letters back to Wisconsin to your folks?”
“What have I to do with that? Why shouldn’t he write to my mother? Who has a better right?”
“Don’t drive me too far. By God! if I go away alone I’ll never leave you here to run off with Whispering Smith—remember that!” She sat in silence. His rage left her perfectly quiet, and her unmoved expression shamed and in part silenced him. “Don’t drive me too far,” he muttered sullenly. “If you do you will be responsible, Marion.”
She did not move her eyes from the blue hills on the horizon. “I expect you to kill me sometime; I feel sure you will. And that you may do.” Then she bent her look on him. “You may do it now if you want to.”
His face turned heavy with rage. “Marion,” he cried, with an oath, “do you know how close you are to death at this moment?”
“You may do it now.”
He clinched the bench-rail and rose slowly to his feet. Marion sat motionless in the hickory chair; the sun was shining in her face and her hands were folded in her lap. Dicksie rocked on the porch. In the shadow of the house the man was mending the saddle.