Frank Spearman - Whispering Smith

“It is possible I am; but if he is working for the company, it is pretty certain that I am not,” he continued, heaping mystification on her. “However, that will not prevent my delivering the message. By the way, may I ask which shoulder?”

“Shoulder!”

“Which shoulder is sprung.”

“Oh, of course! The right shoulder, and it is sprung pretty badly, too, Cousin Lance says. How very stupid of me to ride over here for a freight wreck!”

McCloud felt humiliated at having nothing better worth while to offer. “It was a very bad one,” he ventured.

“But not of the kind I can be of any help at, I fear.”

McCloud smiled. “We are certainly short of help.”

Dicksie brought her horse’s head around. She felt again of the girth as she replied, “Not such as I can supply, I’m afraid.” And with the words she stepped away, as if preparing to mount.

McCloud intervened. “I hope you won’t go away without resting your horse. The sun is so hot. Mayn’t I offer you some sort of refreshment?”

Dicksie Dunning thought not.

“The sun is very warm,” persisted McCloud.

Dicksie smoothed her gauntlet in the assured manner natural to her. “I am pretty well used to it.”

But McCloud held on. “Several cars of fruit were destroyed in the wreck. I can offer you any quantity of grapes–crates of them are spoiling over there–and pears.”

“Thank you, I am just from luncheon.”

“And I have cooled water in the car. I hope you won’t refuse that, so far out in the desert.”

Dicksie laughed a little. “Do you call this far? I don’t; and I don’t call this desert by any means. Thank you ever so much for the water, but I’m not in the least thirsty.”

“It was kind of you even to think of extending help. I wish you would let me send some fruit over to your ranch. It is only spoiling here.”

Dicksie stroked the neck of her horse. “It is about eighteen miles to the ranch house.”

“I don’t call that far.”

“Oh, it isn’t,” she returned hastily, professing not to notice the look that went with the words, “except for perishable things!” Then, as if acknowledging her disadvantage, she added, swinging her bridle-rein around, “I am under obligations for the offer, just the same.”

“At least, won’t you let your horse drink?” McCloud threw the force of an appeal into his words, and Dicksie stopped her preparations and appeared to waver.

“Jim is pretty thirsty, I suppose. Have you plenty of water?”

“A tender full. Had I better lead him down while you wait up on the hill in the shade?”

“Can’t I ride him down?”

“It would be pretty rough riding.”

“Oh, Jim goes anywhere,” she said, with her attractive indifference to situations. “If you don’t mind helping me mount.”

“With pleasure.”

She stood waiting for his hand, and McCloud stood, not knowing just what to do. She glanced at him expectantly. The sun grew intensely hot.

“You will have to show me how,” he stammered at last.

“Don’t you know?”

He mentally cursed the technical education that left him helpless at such a moment, but it was useless to pretend. “Frankly, I don’t!”

“Just give me your hand. Oh, not in that way! But never mind, I’ll walk,” she suggested, catching up her skirt.

“The rocks will cut your boots all to pieces. Suppose you tell me what to do this once,” he said, assuming some confidence. “I’ll never forget.”

“Why, if you will just give me your hand for my foot, I can manage, you know.”

He did not know, but she lifted her skirt graciously, and her crushed boot rested easily for a moment in his hand. She rose in the air above him before he could well comprehend. He felt the quick spring from his supporting hand, and it was an instant of exhilaration. Then she balanced herself with a flushed laugh in the saddle, and he guided her ahead among the loose rocks, the horse nosing at his elbow as they picked their way.

Crossing the track, they gained better ground. As they reached the switch and passed a box car, Jim shied, and Dicksie spoke sharply to him. McCloud turned.

In the shade of the car lay the tramp.

“That man lying there frightened him,” explained Dicksie. “Oh,” she exclaimed suddenly, “he has been hurt!” She turned away her head. “Is that the man who was in the wreck?”

“Yes.”

“Do something for him. He must be suffering terribly.”

“The men gave him some water awhile ago, and when we moved him into the shade we thought he was dead.”

“He isn’t dead yet!” Dicksie’s face, still averted, had grown white. “I saw him move. Can’t you do something for him?”

She reined up at a little distance. McCloud bent over the man a moment and spoke to him. When he rose he called to the men on the track. “You are right,” he said, rejoining Dicksie; “he is very much alive. His name is Wickwire; he is a cowboy.”

“A cowboy!”

“A tramp cowboy.”

“What can you do with him?”

“I’ll have the men put him in the caboose and send him to Barnhardt’s hospital at Medicine Bend when the engine comes back. He may live yet. If he does, he can thank you for it.”

McCloud was an exception to every tradition that goes to make up a mountain railroad man. He was from New England, with a mild voice and a hand that roughened very slowly. McCloud was a classmate of Morris Blood’s at the Boston “Tech,” and the acquaintance begun there continued after the two left school, with a scattering fire of letters between the mountains and New England, as few and as far between as men’s letters usually scatter after an ardent school acquaintance.

There were just two boys in the McCloud family–John and George. One had always been intended for the church, the other for science. Somehow the boys got mixed in their cradles, or, what is the same matter, in their assignments, and John got into the church. For George, who ought to have been a clergyman, nothing was left but a long engineering course for which, after he got it, he appeared to have no use. However, it seemed a little late to shift the life alignments. John had the pulpit and appeared disposed to keep it, and George was left, like a New England farm, to wonder what had become of himself.

It is, nevertheless, odd how matters come about. John McCloud, a prosperous young clergyman, stopped on a California trip at Medicine Bend to see brother George’s classmate and something of a real Western town. He saw nothing sensational–it was there, but he did not see it–but he found both hospitality and gentlemen, and, if surprised, was too well-bred to admit it. His one-day stop ran on to several days. He was a guest at the Medicine Bend Club, where he found men who had not forgotten the Harvard Greek plays. He rode in private cars and ate antelope steak grilled by Glover’s own darky boy, who had roasted buffalo hump for the Grand Duke Alexis as far back as 1871, and still hashed his browned potatoes in ragtime; and with the sun breaking clear over the frosty table-lands, a ravenous appetite, and a day’s shooting in prospect, the rhythm had a particularly cheerful sound. John was asked to occupy a Medicine Bend pulpit, and before Sunday the fame of his laugh and his marksmanship had spread so far that Henry Markover, the Yale cowboy, rode in thirty-two miles to hear him preach. In leaving, John McCloud, in a seventh heaven of enthusiasm over the high country, asked Morris Blood why he could not find something for George out there; and Blood, not even knowing the boy wanted to come, wrote for him, and asked Bucks to give him a job. Possibly, being over-solicitous, George was nervous when he talked to Bucks; possibly the impression left by his big, strong, bluff brother John made against the boy; at all events, Bucks, after he talked with George, shook his head. “I could make a first-class railroad man out of the preacher, Morris, but not out of the brother. Yes, I’ve talked with him. He can’t do anything but figure elevations, and, by heaven, we can’t feed our own engineers here now.” So George found himself stranded in the mountains.