Whispering Smith - Frank H. Spearman

“I wanted to have evening clothes.”

“Yes.”

“And for once in my life two pairs of suspenders––a modest ambition, but a gnawing one. Would you believe it? Before I left Bucks’s office he had hired me for a railroad man. When he asked me what I could do, and I admitted a little experience in handling real estate, he brought his 212 fist down on the table and swore I should be his right-of-way man.”

“How about the mining?”

Whispering Smith waved his hand in something of the proud manner in which Bucks could wave his presidential hand. “My business, Bucks said, need not interfere with that, not in the least; he said that I could do all the mining I wanted to, and I have done all the mining I wanted to. But here is the singular thing that happened: I opened up my office and had nothing to do; they didn’t seem to want any right of way just then. I kept getting my check every month, and wasn’t doing a hand’s turn but riding over the country and shooting jack-rabbits. But, Lord, I love this country! Did you know I used to be a cowboy in the mountains years ago? Indeed I did. I know it almost as well as you do. I mined more or less in the meantime. Occasionally I would go to Bucks––you say you don’t know him?––too bad!––and tell him candidly I wasn’t doing a thing to earn my salary. At such times he would only ask me how I liked the job,” and Whispering Smith’s heavy eyebrows rose in mild surprise at the recollection. “One day when I was talking with him he handed me a telegram from the desert saying that a night operator at a lonely station had been shot and a switch misplaced and a train nearly wrecked. He asked me 213 what I thought of it. I discovered that the poor fellow had shot himself, and in the end we had to put him in the insane asylum to save him from the penitentiary––but that was where my trouble began.

“It ended in my having to organize the special service on the whole road to look after a thousand and one things that nobody else had––well, let us say time or inclination to look after: fraud and theft and violence and all that sort of disagreeable thing. Then one day the cat crawled out of the bag. What do you think? That man who is now president of this road had somewhere seen a highly colored story about me in a magazine, a ten-cent magazine, you know. He had spotted me the first time I walked into his office, and told me a long time afterward it was just like seeing a man walk out of a book, and that he had hard work to keep from falling on my neck. He knew what he wanted me for; it was just this thing. I left Chicago to get away from it, and this is the result. It is not all that kind of thing, oh, no! When they want to cross a reservation I have a winter in Washington with our attorneys and dine with old friends in the White House, and the next winter I may be on snowshoes chasing a band of rustlers. I swore long ago I would do no more of it––that I couldn’t and wouldn’t. But it is Bucks. I can’t go back 214 on him. He is amiable and I am soft. He says he is going to have a crown and harp for me some day, but I fancy––that is, I have an intimation––that there will be a red-hot protest at the bar of Heaven,” he lowered his tone, “from a certain unmentionable quarter when I undertake to put the vestments on. By the way, I hear you are interested in chickens. Oh, yes, I’ve heard a lot about you! Bob Johnson, over at Oroville, has some pretty bantams I want to tell you about.”

Whether he talked railroad or chickens, it was all one: Dicksie sat spellbound; and when he announced it was half-past three o’clock and time to rouse Marion, she was amazed.