“If you will take your best two men, Ed,” said Whispering Smith, sitting down with Banks at breakfast, “and strike straight for Canadian Pass to help Gene and Bob Johnson, I’ll undertake to ride in and talk to Rebstock while Kennedy and Bob Scott watch Deep Creek. The boy gives a good description, and the two men that did the job here are Du Sang and Flat Nose. Did I tell you how we picked up the trail yesterday? Magpies. They shot a scrub horse that gave out on them and skinned the brand. It hastened the banquet, but we got there before the birds were all seated. Great luck, wasn’t it? And it gave us a beautiful trail. One of the party crossed the Goose River at American Fork, and Brill Young and Reed followed 282 him. Four came through the Mission Mountains; that is a cinch and they are in the Cache––and if they get out it is our fault personally, Ed, and not the Lord’s.”
Williams Cache lies in the form of a great horn, with a narrow entrance at the lower end known as the Door, and a rock fissure at the upper end leading into Canadian Pass; but this fissure is so narrow that a man with a rifle could withstand a regiment. For a hundred miles east and west rise the granite walls of the Mission range, broken nowhere save by the formation known as the Cache. Even this does not penetrate the range; it is a pocket, and runs not over half-way into it and out again. But no man really knows the Cache; the most that may be said is that the main valley is known, and it is known as the roughest mountain fissure between the Spanish Sinks and the Mantrap country. Williams Cache lies between walls two thousand feet high, and within it is a small labyrinth of canyons. A generation ago, when Medicine Bend for one winter was the terminus of the overland railroad, vigilantes mercilessly cleaned out the town, and the few outlaws that escaped the shotgun and the noose at Medicine Bend found refuge in a far-away and unknown mountain gorge once named by French trappers the Cache. Years after these outcasts had come to infest it came one desperado 283 more ferocious than all that had gone before. He made a frontier retreat of the Cache, and left to it the legacy of his evil name, Williams. Since his day it has served, as it served before, for the haunt of outlawed men. No honest man lives in Williams Cache, and few men of any sort live there long, since their lives are lives of violence; neither the law nor a woman crosses Deep Creek. But from the day of Williams to this day the Cache has had its ruler, and when Whispering Smith rode with a little party through the Door into the Cache the morning after the murder in Mission Valley he sent an envoy to Rebstock, whose success as a cattle-thief had brought its inevitable penalty. It had made Rebstock a man of consequence and of property and a man subject to the anxieties and annoyances of such responsibility.
Sitting once in the Three Horses at Medicine Bend, Rebstock had talked with Whispering Smith. “I used to have a good time,” he growled. “When I was rustling a little bunch of steers, just a small bunch all by myself, and hadn’t a cent in the world, no place to sleep and nothing to eat, I had a good time. Now I have to keep my money in the bank; that ain’t pleasant––you know that. Every man that brings a bunch of cattle across Deep Creek has stole ’em, and expects me to buy ’em or lend him money. I’m busy with inspecters 284 all the time, deviling with brands, standing off the Stock Association and all kinds of trouble. I’ve got too many cows, too much money. I’m afraid somebody will shoot me if I go to sleep, or poison me if I take a drink. Whispering Smith, I’d like to give you a half-interest in my business. That’s on the square. You’re a young man, and handy; it wouldn’t cost you a cent, and you can have half of the whole shooting-match if you’ll cross Deep Creek and help me run the gang.” Such was Rebstock free from anxiety and in a confidential moment. Under pressure he was, like all men, different.
Whispering Smith had acquaintance even in the Cache, and after a little careful reconnoitring he found a crippled-up thief, driving a milch cow down the Cache, who was willing to take a message to the boss.
Whispering Smith gave his instructions explicitly, facing the messenger, as the two sat in their saddles, with an importunate eye. “Say to Rebstock exactly these words,” he insisted. “This is from Whispering Smith: I want Du Sang. He killed a friend of mine last night at Mission Springs. I happened to be near there and know he rode in last night. He can’t get out; the Canadian is plugged. I won’t stand for the killing, and it is Du Sang or a clean-up in the Cache all 285 around, and then I’ll get Du Sang anyway. Regards.”
Riding circumspectly in and about the entrance to the Cache, the party waited an hour for an answer. When the answer came, it was unsatisfactory. Rebstock declined to appear upon so trivial a matter, and Whispering Smith refused to specify a further grievance. More parley and stronger messages were necessary to stir the Deep Creek monarch, but at last he sent word asking Whispering Smith to come to his cabin accompanied only by Kennedy.
The two railroad men rode up the canyon together. “And now I will show you a lean and hungry thief grown monstrous and miserly, Farrell,” said Whispering Smith.
At the head of a short pocket between two sheer granite walls they saw Rebstock’s weather-beaten cabin, and he stood in front of it smoking. He looked moodily at his visitors out of eyes buried between rolls of fat. Whispering Smith was a little harsh as the two shook hands, but he dismounted and followed Rebstock into the house.
“What are you so high and mighty about?” he demanded, throwing his hat on the table near which Rebstock had seated himself. “Why don’t you come out when I send a man to you, or send word what you will do? What have you 286 got to kick about? Haven’t you been treated right?”
Being in no position to complain, but shrewdly aware that much unpleasantness was in the wind, Rebstock beat about the bush. He had had rheumatism; he couldn’t ride; he had been in bed three weeks and hadn’t seen Du Sang for three months. “You ain’t chasing up here after Du Sang because he killed a man at Mission Springs. I know better than that. That ain’t the first man he’s killed, and it ain’t a’ goin’ to be the last.”