“Where––there? No! Yes, hold on, that’s the man there now! Hold on, now!” urged Bill, struggling with the excitement of ten hours and ten dollars all in one day. “His name sounded like Fogarty.”
As Dancing spoke, Sinclair’s eyes riveted on the new face at the other side of the gambling-room. “Fogarty, hell!” he exclaimed, starting. “Stand right still, Du Sang; don’t look around. That man is Whispering Smith.” 103
CHAPTER XII
PARLEY
It was recalled one evening not long ago at the Wickiup that the affair with Sinclair had all taken place within a period of two years, and that practically all of the actors in the event had been together and in friendly relation on a Thanksgiving Day at the Dunning ranch not so very long before the trouble began. Dicksie Dunning was away at school at the time, and Lance Dunning was celebrating with a riding and shooting fest and a barbecue.
The whole country had been invited. Bucks was in the mountains on an inspection trip, and Bill Dancing drove him with a party of railroad men over from Medicine Bend. The mountain men for a hundred and fifty miles around were out. Gene and Bob Johnson, from Oroville and the Peace River, had come with their friends. From Williams Cache there was not only a big delegation––more of one than was really desirable––but it was led by old John Rebstock himself. When the invitation is general, lines cannot be too closely 104 drawn. Not only was Lance Dunning something of a sport himself, but on the Long Range it is part of a stockman’s creed to be on good terms with his neighbors. At a Thanksgiving Day barbecue not even a mountain sheriff would ask questions, and Ed Banks, though present, respected the holiday truce. Cowboys rode that day in the roping contest who were from Mission Creek and from Two Feather River.
Among the railroad people were George McCloud, Anderson, the assistant superintendent, Farrell Kennedy, chief of the special service, and his right-hand man, Bob Scott. In especial, Sinclair’s presence at the barbecue was recalled. He had some cronies with him from among his up-country following, and was introducing his new bridge foreman, Karg, afterward known as Flat Nose, and George Seagrue, the Montana cowboy. Sinclair fraternized that day with the Williams Cache men, and it was remarked even then that though a railroad man he appeared somewhat outside the railroad circle. When the shooting matches were announced a brown-eyed railroad man was asked to enter. He had been out of the mountains for some time and was a comparative stranger in the gathering, but the Williams Cache men had not forgotten him; Rebstock, especially, wanted to see him shoot. While much of the time out of the 105 mountains on railroad business, he was known to be closely in Bucks’s counsels, and as to the mountains themselves, he was reputed to know them better than Bucks or Glover himself knew them. This was Whispering Smith; but, beyond a low-voiced greeting or an expression of surprise at meeting an old acquaintance, he avoided talk. When urged to shoot he resisted all persuasion and backed up his refusal by showing a bruise on his trigger finger. He declined even to act as judge in the contest, suggesting the sheriff, Ed Banks, for that office.
The rifle matches were held in the hills above the ranch-house, and in the contest between the ranches, for which a sweepstakes had been arranged, Sinclair entered Seagrue, who was then working for him. Seagrue shot all the morning and steadily held up the credit of the Frenchman Valley Ranch against the field. Neither continued shooting nor severe tests availed to upset Sinclair’s entry, and riding back after the matches with the prize purse in his pocket, Seagrue, who was tall, light-haired, and perfectly built, made a new honor for himself on a dare from Stormy Gorman, the foreman of the Dunning ranch. Gorman, who had ridden a race back with Sinclair, was at the foot of the long hill, down which the crowd was riding, when he stopped, yelled back at Seagrue, 106 and, swinging his hat from his head, laid it on a sloping rock beside the trail.