“I say so.”
Sinclair swept the ice furiously from his beard and his right hand fell to his hip as he stepped back. “You’ve turned against me too, have you, you gray-haired wolf? Can’t see her! Get out of that door.”
The surgeon pointed his finger at the murderer. “No, I won’t get out of this door. Shoot, you coward! Shoot an unarmed man. You will not live to get a hundred feet away. This place is watched for you; you could not have got within a hundred yards of it to-night except for this snow.” Barnhardt pointed through the storm. “Sinclair, you will hang in the court-house square, and I will take the last beat of your pulse with these fingers, and when I pronounce you dead they will cut you down. You want to see your wife. You want to kill her. Don’t lie; you want to kill her. You were heard to say as much to-night at the Dunning ranch. You were watched and tracked, and you are expected and looked for here. Your best friends have gone back on you. 392 Ay, curse again and over again, but that will not put Ed Banks on his feet.”
Sinclair stamped with frenzied oaths. “You’re too hard on me,” he cried, clenching his hands. “I say you’re too hard. You’ve heard one side of it. Is that the way you put judgment on a man that’s got no friends left because they start a new lie on him every day? Who is it that’s watching me? Let them stand out like men in the open. If they want me, let them come like men and take me!”
“Sinclair, this storm gives you a chance to get away; take it. Bad as you are, there are men in Medicine Bend who knew you when you were a man. Don’t stay here for some of them to sit on the jury that hangs you. If you can get away, get away. If I were your friend––and God knows whom you can call friend in Medicine Bend to-night––I couldn’t say more. Get away before it is too late.”
He was never again seen alive in Medicine Bend. They tracked him next day over every foot of ground he had covered. They found where he had left his spent horse and where afterward he had got the fresh one. They learned how he had eluded all the picketing planned for precisely such a contingency, got into the Wickiup, got upstairs and burst open the very door of McCloud’s room. 393 But Dicksie had on her side that night One greater than her invincible will or her faithful horse. McCloud was two hundred miles away.
Barnhardt lost no time in telephoning the Wickiup that Sinclair was in town, but within an hour, while the two women were still under the surgeon’s protection, a knock at the cottage door gave them a second fright. Barnhardt answered the summons. He opened the door and, as the man outside paused to shake the snow off his hat, the surgeon caught him by the shoulder and dragged into the house Whispering Smith.
Picking the icicles from his hair, Smith listened to all that Barnhardt said, his eyes roving meantime over everything within the room and mentally over many things outside it. He congratulated Barnhardt, and when Marion came into the room he apologized for the snow he had brought in. Dicksie heard his voice and cried out from the bedroom. They could not keep her away, and she ran out to catch his hands and plead with him not to go away. He tried to assure her that the danger was over; that guards were now outside everywhere, and would be until morning. But Dicksie clung to him and would take no refusal.
Whispering Smith looked at her in amazement and in admiration. “You are captain to-night, Miss Dicksie, by Heaven. If you say the word 394 I’ll lie here on a rug till morning. But that man will not be back to-night. You are a queen. If I had a mountain girl that would do as much as that for me I would–––”
“What would you do?” asked Marion.