Argosy All-Story Weekly/Volume 124/Number 3/The Whisperer
The Whisperer
by Max Brand
Author of “The Frigate Bird,” “The Untamed,” etc.
CHAPTER I.
PATRICIA FINDS WORK.
UNQUESTIONABLY the average man considers that woman's God given vocation is the rearing of children. One may even go so far as to say that the average woman concurs in this judgment.
Which prepares the stage for the entrance of Patricia Lauriston, who was not average. Though she admitted that fate and the ways of the world condemned the majority of her sex to marriage, this admission only made her stamp along in shoes a little broader of toe and a little lower of heel. Not that she wished to be mannish. She was not. All she desired escape from was that femininity which bounds its world with children on the one side and a husband on the other.
Neither should it be understood that Patricia disliked men. On the contrary, she frankly preferred them to her own sex. Her whole struggle, in fact, was to be accepted by men as a friend, and it cut her to the heart to watch the antics of fellows who had courage enough to woo her. She noted that men among men were frank, open of hand and heart and eye, generous, brave, good-humored; she noted that the same men among women became simpering, smirking fantastic fools. A man among men tried to be himself; a man among women dreaded nothing so much as the exposure of his own innate simplicity and manhood. All this Patricia had discovered by long and patient experiment.
There was the case of Steven Worth, for instance. Steve was the best friend of her brother, Hal Lauriston, and Steve was almost another member of the family. Until, on a day, Patricia came home from school in long skirts. Instead of picking her up by the elbows and throwing her ceilingwards, as had been his custom in the past, Steve shook hands, blushed, and suggested a walk in the garden. Patricia was only sixteen at the time, but she knew what was coming; a girl of sixteen is at least equal to a man of twenty-six, plus certain instinctive knowledge which has never left the blood of woman since that sunshiny day in the garden when Eve ate the apple and whispered with the serpent.
Therefore Patricia knew, I say, exactly what was coming, but she allowed the disease to develop and take hold on Steven Worth. She let him hold her hand; she let him look into her eyes and smile in a peculiarly asinine manner interspersed with occasional glances toward the stars. Three days and nights of this, and then Steve fell on his knees and asked her to be his wife. It didn't thrill Patricia. It merely disgusted her and made her feel very lonely. She told Steve just how she felt and went back into the house.
The next morning Hal Lauriston came to her room and swore that she had broken the heart of his dearest friend and that she was a devilish little cat; the next noon Steven Worth, she learned, had purchased a ticket for South America. Patricia went to Steve and told him—well, she told him many things, and in the end Steve Worth declared that she was the “bulliest little scout in the world” and that he was “no end of an ass.” Patricia concurred silently in the last remark. The end of it was that Steve did not go to South America to die of swamp fever; but both he and Patricia knew that they could never be friends again.
The point of all this is that Patricia did not, certainly, miss Steve as a husband, but she regretted him mightily as a friend. She went abroad among the world of men, thereafter, and tried to make other friends to take the place of Steve, but she discovered that after friendship had progressed to a certain point the finest of men began to grow silent and thoughtful and a certain hungry look came in their eyes. The bitter truth came home to Patricia that she was too beautiful to have a single friend; many a time she bowed her head before her mirror and wept because her eyes were of a certain blackness and her hair of a certain dark and silken length. This sounds like fiction, but to Patricia it was a grim and heart-breaking truth.
Now, an average woman of this temperament, at a certain point in her life, would have taken up woman suffrage or prohibition—or Greek. Patricia, however, was not average. She refused to believe that all men are weak-kneed sentimentalists; she looked abroad, like Alexander, to a new world, and new battles.
It followed, quite naturally, that Patricia should go West. For she had heard sundry tales of a breed of men who inhabit the mountain-desert, men stronger than adversity and hard of hard and of heart, men too bitterly trained in the battle of existence to pay any heed to the silken side of life. She hoped to find among them at least some few who. would look first for a human being, and afterward for a sex.
This would have been enough to send Patricia to the mountain-desert. There was another reason sufficiently unfeminine to interest her. One year before, a second cousin who bore her family name, Mortimer Lauriston, had been shot in the town of Eagles in the mountain-desert by a man named Vincent St. Gore. St. Gore had been tried, but the jury had always disagreed. Patricia Lauriston decided that it would be her work to tear the blindfold from the eyes of justice and bring an overdue fate upon this Vincent St. Gore. She could live not exactly in the town of Eagles, but at the ranch formerly owned by Mortimer Lauriston, and now operated by another cousin, Joseph Gregory. Having made up her mind, Patricia packed her trunk, kissed her mother good-by, and from the train sent back post-cards of farewell to her more intimate friends.
Which brings us to Eagles, a white-hot day in May, the hills spotted with mesquite, and below the hills the illimitable plains, the stopping of the stage with its six dripping horses, and the entrance of Patricia into the mountain-desert.
She was not disappointed. She liked everything she saw—the fierce heat of the day—the unshaven men—the buckboard of Joseph Gregory waiting to meet her. Even Joseph himself was not displeasing to her, though in a population where none were overly attractive Joseph was commonly called “Ugly Joe.” His forehead was so low and slanting that his dirty-white sombrero had to be pulled literally over his eyebrows—otherwise it would have blown off. His eyes were small and a very pale blue. His nose was both diminutive and sprawling, as if it had been battered out of shape in fistic battles. Below the nose his face ceased and his mustache began. It was the pride of Ugly Joe. The stiff hairs descended like a host of simitar-shaped bristles far-past his lower lip and at either side the mustache jagged down in points which swept far below his chin. He was like a man in a perpetual mask. If he had shaved not even his wife would have known him. Patricia, however, was undismayed. She advanced with her suit-case and claimed relationship.
Ugly Joe parted his mustache, spat over the forward wheel of the buckboard, considered her a silent moment, and then touched the brim of his sombrero by way of salutation.
“Evening,” said Ugly Joe, “throw up your grip and climb in.”
“But I have a trunk,” said Patricia. “Isn't there room for that behind?”
“Sure! Is that your trunk?”
And he pointed to a wardrobe-trunk which was being rolled onto the “hotel veranda. She nodded and offered to get help for the handling of the trunk, for she remembered how two expressmen had sweated and grunted over that trunk, but Cousin Joe shook his head and climbed down from the buckboard. He was a short man, bent from riding horseback, and he walked with ¢he shuffling hobble of the old cattleman, putting his weight on his toes. He was short, but exceedingly broad, and when a couple of men had helped him to shoulder the trunk he came back, hobbling along with it and showing no apparent discomfort. He dumped it in the back of the buckboard, which heaved and groaned under the burden.
“Might I ask,” said Ugly Joe, as they climbed up to the front seat, “if them are all clothes you got in that trunk?”
“Mostly,” answered Patricia.
“H-m!” remarked Cousin Joe, and started his ponies over the homeward path.
For half an hour they jolted along in silence over what might have been a road.
“Maybe,” said Ugly Joe at length, “you figure on starting a store with that many clothes?”
Now Patricia had prided herself on traveling light into the wilderness. There were only a few negligees, some house-dresses, morning-gowns, and several riding and walking outfits, as well as one or two tailored suits. She had not brought a single evening dress! Accordingly she stared at Ugly Joe in some surprise, but before she could reply he went on:
“You're considerable well fixed for clothes and a name, eh? What's your name again?”
“Patricia,” she answered.
“Patricia? And what do folks call you for short?”
“Nothing else. Personally, I don't believe in nicknames.”
“D'you mean to say,” said Ugly Joe, much moved, “that when your ma or your pa speaks to you they always take that much tongue-trouble and spend that much air? Patricia!”
He did not repeat it scoffingly, but rather with much wonder. Patricia decided that being in Rome she must adapt herself to the customs of the country.
“I suppose,'” she said, “that it could be shortened.”
“Between you and me,” confided Ugly Joe, “it 'll have to be shortened. Long names ain't popular much around here. Look at them hosses. S'pose I give them fancy names, how'd I ever handle 'em? S'pose I wanted 'em to stop and I had to say: 'Whoa, Elizabeth Virginia II and Johnny Payne III.' Nope, you can see for yourself that wouldn't do. A long name is as much in the way as a long barrel on a shotgun when you want to shoot quick.”
“What do you call your horses?” asked Patricia.
“The nigh one is Spit and the off one is Fire. I just say: 'Giddap, Spit-fire! and we're off. See?”
“Oh,” smiled Patricia, “and what will you call me?”
“I'll leave off the fancy part. Pat is a good enough name. What say?”
“That,” said Patricia, “will be fine.”
“Sure. I call you Pat and you call me Joe. Simple; easy to remember; saves lots of wind and talking. Talking ain't popular none with me.”
And he proved it by maintaining a resolute silence for the next fifteen minutes. As for Patricia; she was too busy sweeping the plains with a critical eye to wish for talk. Moreover, the silence was pleasing. That was a way men had with each other. She began to feel, also, that she had at last reached a country where a pretty face was not a passport to all hearts; she would have to prove herself before she would be accepted.
CHAPTER II.
THE KILLING OF LAURISTON.
NOT that this was in the least discouraging to Patricia. She was, indeed, rather excited and stimulated by the prospect, as an athlete feels himself keyed to the highest point of efficiency by a contest with a rival of unquestioned prowess. She swept the country with a critical eye; she glimpsed the massive, bended shoulders cf Ugly Joe with a side glance; the mesquite-dotted hills, the white-hot plains, the man who lived in them—all were good in the eye of Patricia. She would have accepted the silence of her companion and persisted in it, but she came to this place for a purpose and talk was necessary before she could accomplish it.
“I suppose,” said Patricia, “that every one wonders why I've come out here?”
Ugly Joe had caught the reins between his knees while he rolled a cigarette. Now he finished licking the paper smooth and bent a meditative eye upon Patricia while he lighted his cigarette and inhaled the first puff.
“Don't know that I've heard any remarks,” he responded at length. “Giddap, Spit-fire!”
They jolted over a particularly uneven stretch of the trail. When Patrica had caught her breath again she said: “Nevertheless, I'll tell you, Cousin Joe. I've come out here to run down the murderer of Mortimer Lauriston!”
She waited for this verbal bull's-eye to take effect, but Ugly Joe seemed not a whit interested.
“That ain't hard,” he answered. “You can pick him up mostly any day in Eagles.”
“I,” said Patricia, “am going to have him tried—and hung.”
“H-m!” grunted Ugly Joe. “Where you going to get a jury to convict him?”
“Is it hard to do that?”
“I'll say it's hard!”
“Does he bribe the jurors?”
“Nope, not exactly.”
“Is this murderer too popular to be convicted?”
“Him?” Ugly Joe grinned for the first time. “Nope, it 'd be a hard job to find a feller less popular than this Goggles.”
“Goggles? I thought his name is Vincent St. Gore?”
“Maybe it is, but who could remember a word as long as that? We call him Goggles because of the funny glasses he wears—big ones with black rims. Makes him look like a frog. Goggles popular? Not around here, Pat. Nope, he's just a plain, damned dude, that's what he is. Out here for a couple of years for his health. Little, skinny feller who goes around in fancy, shined-up riding-boots and trousers baggy above the knees. Lives over to Widow Morgan's house, where he got a piano moved in and he just sits around and tickles the keys, or mosies out and rides a fine, foreign, high-steppin' hoss around. Never talks much to anybody. He forgets everybody as quick as he's introduced to 'em. Popular? Hell, no! Excuse me.”
The description was a distant shock to Patricia. She had pictured, quite naturally, a tall, gaunt, swarthy rider of the mountain-desert, black-browed, black-eyed, fierce, silent. Instead, here was a man who fitted his name—Vincent St. Gore—possibly some disinherited second son, the black sheep of some honorable family.
“But if he doesn't bribe the jurors, and if he isn't popular,” she queried, “how in the world does he manage to escape scot-free? Is it because Mortimer Lauriston was disliked—because the people of Eagles were glad to get rid of him?”
“Nope, everybody liked old Mort. He never did no harm, except when he was full of red-eye.”
“Then,” said Patricia desperately, “was it because St. Gore—your man Goggles—killed Mortimer in self-defense?”
“Pat,” said Ugly Joe, grinning again, “the more I hear you talk the more I see that you sure are the cousin of my wife Martha. She does just the same way. Get her talking about anything and she hangs on like a bulldog till she's got out of me all I know. I can see you're the same way and I'll be savin' myself if I tell you the whole yarn right here and now.”
“Good,” said Patricia, unabashed.
“It was in Langley's saloon,” said Ugly Joe. “'S a matter of fact most of these hell-raisin's begin with red-eye and end with guns. Well, it was along about the middle of the afternoon. I was in there, so was about twenty more. And there was Goggles standin' at one end of the bar sipping whisky mixed up with seltzer-water out of a high glass. He never would drink whisky straight like a regular honest man. There he stood, staring straight in front of him that. way he has and never seeming to see nothing that happened near him.
“About that time in come Mort Lauriston. He was lit to the eyes, was old Mort, and when he got drunk he was some noisy. Which everybody knew he didn't mean nothing and they let him go along pounding 'em on the back. He ordered up drinks for the crowd and everybody accepted but Goggles. Nobody ever included him in anything. He was just part of the landscape like one of them hills over there. He was there, but he didn't mean nothing; but Mort seen him and he got mad. He goes up and says: 'Partner, whisky wasn't never meant to be spoiled by mixing with water.'
“Then he grabs Goggles's high glass and spills the mixture out on the floor.
“'Hey, Pete,' he says to the bartender, “give this feller Goggles a man-sized drink of man-sized booze.'
“Everybody laughed. They was all tickled at the thought of Goggles drinking straight red-eye. Pete put up a whisky-glass filled to the brim.
“Goggles was standing there pretty quiet. He just fixed the glasses different on his nose and stands there staring at Mort. The whisky has splashed pretty liberal across them fine riding-boots of his, but he didn't make an ugly move.
“He says: 'Mr. Lauriston, I'm sure that you have carried your little game far enough. You certainly don't intend to make me drink that glass of vile bar-whisky.'
“'Don't I?' says Mort, and the rest of us laughed. 'Bud, you're going to drink every drop of it!'
“Goggles takes off his glasses and wipes them careful on his handkerchief, puts them back, and studies Mort like a rock-hound looking at a new kind of ore.
“He says in that soft, low voice of his: 'You are apparently very drunk, Mr. Lauriston. What if I refuse to drink this liquor?'
“Out comes Mort with two big gats. He shoves them under the nose of Goggies.
“'Drink, you damned foreign English dude!' he says.
“'Sir,' says Goggles, 'I'm going to drink this under compulsion, not because I fear you, but because I don't want to harm a drunken man. But the next time we meet, Mr. Lauriston, I'm going to kill you.'
“With that he picks up the glass of booze careful, without spilling a drop, and says: 'Here is to our early meeting, sir.' And he drinks the glass down without batting an eye, bows to Mort, and walks out of the saloon.
“'Well, I'll be damned,' says Mort. 'What d'you think of that?'
“Herb Fisher speaks up and says: 'I dunno how you figure it, Mort, but if I was you I'd keep my guns ready for a fast draw the next time I seen Goggles. He don't look none too dangerous, but looks is deceiving.'
“Mort, he took that to heart. He left town pretty hurried: and it was about ten days before he come back. At least, he started back, and afterward they found his body on the road near Eagles. He'd been shot fair and square between the eyes and his guns was lying near him with a bullet fired out of each of them, showing that he'd had a chance to fight for his life. He wasn't shot down from no ambush.
“Of course they arrested Goggles. The sheriff took half a dozen deputies along to help out in case of a muss, but Goggles didn't turn a hair. He walked right into the jail, give a big bond, and never made a move to get away before the trial.
“At the trial he didn't have a chance, it looked like. Everybody knew that Mort was a harmless, noisy sort of gent. Maybe he done wrong in making Goggles drink, but there wasn't no call for any gun-play. That was what the district attorney kept pumping into the jury all through the trial and they were all set to hang Goggles. Everybody knew that. But when the last day of the trial came along, right when the district attorney was making his last big spiel, a little piece of paper comes fluttering like a white bird through the window right behind Goggles, and over his shoulder, and into the lap of one of the gents in the jury-box.
CHAPTER III.
THE PASSING OF KENNEDY.
“”HE unfolded it sort of absent-minded and read what was on it, and then he stood up slow, like he was being pulled up by the hair of the head. And he says: 'God!' just once, soft and easy, but it cut off the speech of the district attorney like a hot knife going through a piece of cheese.
“'What's there?' said the district attorney.
“But the gent that got the paper, he just passed it on to the gent next to him, and that one turned sort of green and sick-looking and moved it on to the next. And so it went all through the jury-box.
“The district attorney finished up; the jury went out and came back in five minutes, saying: 'Not guilty!' Yep, it was a unanimous verdict, and afterward every one on that jury went around telling the boys in a loud voice that he had voted to acquit Goggles, and that he'd like to have the word passed on.”
“It was the paper?” asked Patricia.
“It sure was. There was writ on it: 'Boys, I've got all your names. If you hang Goggles you'll have to tell me why later on.'
“And underneath, the paper was signed: 'The Whisperer.' Now you know why Goggles ain't been touched by the law and why it ain't possible to get a jury in these parts to convict him. Here's the paper. I got a hold of it and I've always kept it with me.'
He drew it from a vest-pocket and handed it to Patricia—a little scrap torn roughly from a larger sheet, and the words on it were scrawled clumsily in back-hand, like the writing of a child of seven.
“The Whisperer!” frowned Patricia. “Who is he?”
“Don't you even know that?” asked Ugly Joe, in disgust. “Well, you'll hear a pile about him before you been in these parts long. He's a lone rider who hangs out somewhere: in them hills. Nobody knows just where; about a'teen posses have hunted for him and never got on his trail. They lay a lot of things to the Whisperer; some of them may be lies, but a pile of them ain't. I know! He's a sort of a ghost, the Whisperer is. He rides a white horse that can go like the wind, and he wears light gray clothes, and a white handkerchief all over his face like a mask. Nobody has ever seen his face, but when he shows up he's known by his voice. It ain't any common voice. It's a sort of a husky hissing, like something had gone wrong with his throat. It takes the heart out of a man to just hear that voice.”
“Yes,” murmured Patricia, “it's ghostly; it's horrible! But are you sure that it was really the Whisperer who threw that paper through the window?”
“That's what a lot of people wanted to know, and particularly Lew Lauriston—you know him—old Mort's brother. He didn't think the Whisperer had anything to do with the case. So he got Porky Kennedy, the two-gun man, to go on the trail of Goggles and put him under the sod. There wasn't much of a secret about it. Everybody in Eagles knew that it was about time for Goggles to move on his way, because Porky Kennedy had a long line of killings to his credit already.
“Porky went to Eagles; but Goggles didn't show no special hurry about leaving. Finally Porky went to Widow Morgan's house for supper one night. Everybody sat around the table scared stiff, because they knew that as soon as Goggles came in there'd be a killing and one foreign English dude less in the world. But Goggles didn't come in. They began to think that the fool dude had finally got some sense behind them glasses of his and left for parts unknown. But about the middle of the meal, while Porky was telling a long story, the door opened and the wind blew the flame jumping up and down in the chimney of the lamp.
“And from the door there was a whisper: 'Kennedy!' And when they looked up, there stood the Whisperer with his white mask and his gray clothes and his voiceless voice. Kennedy pulled his gun, but his hand was shaking so that the gun fell out of his hand and rattled on the floor, and Kennedy dropped on his knees against the wall and covered up his face in his arms, moaning like a sick kid.
“But the Whisperer hadn't come for a killing. He just vanished out the door. Pretty soon in comes Goggles and cocks an eye over to Kennedy as calm as you please. But Kennedy wasn't interested in any killing just then. He ups from his chair and climbed through the door in about two steps. He hasn't been around these parts since. That's one of the good things about the Whisperer. No robber but himself does much flourishing while he's around. There's some say the only ones he picks on is the other crooks. Others say different. I don't know. Well, a couple of days later Lew Lauriston does a fade-away. He didn't even stop to tell us whether the Whisperer had paid him a visit or not, but we just took it for granted.
“If you want to try your hand, Pat, why, it ain't hard to find Eagles, and in Eagles it ain't hard to find Goggles.”
But the arrows of this sarcasm flew harmless over the head of Patricia, for she had fallen into a brown study. Certainly it is not easy to understand Patricia, for I suppose that she never really understood herself. I have never known two people, of all who knew her intimately, who could agree about the main points in her character, and I have always attributed the misunderstanding to the fact that she was so unfemininely serious-minded. Really there was nothing masculine about her except a desire to prove herself of some significance in the world, and because she was so pretty she was confronted with an endless struggle to make the world accept her as something more than a mere ornament. Sometimes the very desperation, of her efforts to do strong things in a strong way made her as stern and hard as any man, and for this reason quite a few misjudged her—in fact, she misjudged herself. To me there was always something plaintive in the quest of Patricia for herself. At the moment when Ugly Joe ceased speaking, for instance, Patricia was really not thinking of the avenging of Mortimer Lauriston's death. She was merely working out a way in which she could prove to Ugly Joe that there was in her a profound difference from that of his talkative wife. Surely here was a man-sized problem—the apprehension and bringing to justice of a murderer whom even the rough-handed dwellers in the mountain-desert dared not touch.
She said at length: “Has it ever occurred to you, Cousin Joe, that the killer of Mortimer Lauriston was really not your man Goggles at all, but the Whisperer?”
Ugly Joe chuckled.
“Has it taken you all this thinking to get that far? Sure, it's occurred to me, and to everybody else. If you ever seen Goggles you'd be sure of it. I've seen him handle a gun in a shooting-gallery. Say, Pat, he couldn't hit the side of a barn with a rock. And there ain't enough heart in that skinny body of his to hurt a swallow. We all seen that as soon as the Whisperer got mixed up in the case. Mort was fast with his guns and he shot straight. It must of took a man about as good as the Whisperer to beat him on the draw and drill him as clean as that after he'd had a chance to work his shooting-irons.”
“The real criminal, then,” mused Patrica, “is the Whisperer.”
And she shivered a little, but went on: “The other man, this Goggles, is evidently just a harmless little cur. I suppose the Whisperer uses him to collect information and then robs the people Goggles points out to him.”
“I s'pose so,” nodded Ugly Joe, who was fast losing interest in the conversation.
“And yet you allow Goggles to wander about at liberty! I can't understand you people, Cousin Joe!”
“You would, Pat, if you'd ever had any dealings with the Whisperer. Maybe he's using Goggles and maybe he isn't. We've never had any proof of that. All we know is that he's Goggles's friend, and as long as that's the case there ain't anybody around here with the courage to mix up with Goggles. You can lay to that.”
“I know,” said Patricia, in the same musing voice, “this Whisperer is a dangerous fellow, but he has his weak point. And I'm going to get him through that weakness!”
“What weakness?” asked Ugly Joe, wakening to a new interest in the case.
“Goggles! The Whisperer may be an outlaw, but he's a man. This Goggles is merely a cowardly little sneak who hides in the terror of the name of the Whisperer. That's why he had the courage to face Mortimer Lauriston. He knew that he could send his man-killer after my cousin. But I'm going to set a trap for the Whisperer, bait it with Goggles, and catch your man for you.”
“Going to do which?” gasped Ugly Joe.
“Wait!” murmured Patricia, and smiled into the contented distance.
CHAPTER IV.
A PLAN FOR TRAPPING.
SHE said after a while: “Cousin Joe, I want you to hire me the four best fighters and straightest shooters you can get. I want four honest men who will—”
“Wait a minute, Pat,” answered the other, “I can find you four first-class gunmen and I can find you, maybe, four first-class, honest men: but I'll be—excuse me—if I can get four honest gunmen. They don't come that way. That ain't their brand. It's this way, Patty: Lots of men can shoot straight at anything but another man. It takes something more than a marksman to shoot down a man; it takes a natural killer, and a natural killer ain't often honest.”
Patricia sat stiffly erect in her place, but she said firmly: “Then if I have to get a gang of cutthroats—well, the end justifies the means! Get me the gunmen, Cousin Joe, and I'll ask no questions about their honesty. Can you get me four men who won't be afraid to fight with the Whisperer?”
Ugly Joe meditated.
He said: “I see there ain't any use trying to persuade you, Pat. Just like Martha. I can get you four gunmen who'd do any murder for a price. There's Chic Wood. He climbed a tree with a shotgun over at Tomanac and shot a man for fifty dollars. But he'd maybe want fifty thousand for killing the Whisperer. I could get some more like Chic. D'you want to work with men like him, Pat?”
“The end,” said Patricia, “justifies the means. Yes, I want any four men—as long as they are dangerous.”
“Then I guess I can get 'em. None of the crooks have any special liking for the Whisperer. He's run most of them out of range of Eagles. All you'll have to do is to pay the price. Can you do that?”
“Anything you think they're worth.”
“And after you get 'em,” said Ugly Joe, “I s'pose you're going to ride through the hills with your posse hunting for the Whisperer?”
“Not at all. I'm going to stay right at your house, Cousin Joe, and wait for the Whisperer to come to me.”
“Pat,” said Joe solemnly, “if you was a man, I'd say you'd been drinking. Wait for the Whisperer to come to you?”
“He will,” answered Patricia. “Will you have the four men at the house to-morrow?”
Ugly Joe made no reply, but sighed heavily as he rolled another cigarette. He had heard about this type of Eastern woman, as aggressive as a man, but he hardly knew what to make of her now that she sat at his side. A Westerner is singularly helpless in the presence of a woman. He is accustomed to making his way through a purely physical prowess. Against the peculiar strength of a woman which is fleshly and yet not of the flesh, he has nothing to pit.
So Ugly Joe felt very much like a tongue-tied boy, unable to recite his lesson to the pretty school ma'am. If he resented the calm appropriation of his house as the trap which was to catch the Whisperer, he felt a counterbalancing excitement which more than made up. He had shot mountain-lions in his time, but this would be a rarer Sport.
They reached the ranch-house. It was formed of great dobe walls from three to four feet in thickness—utterly impervious to the heat of summer or the winds and cold of winter. A one-storied structure, it rambled out in a roomy square around a hexagonal patio in the center. The exterior of that house, dirty-brown, with the deep-set windows gaping like. mouths, was quite in keeping with the exterior of Ugly Joe and with the sweep of rough hills and sordid plain on either side in prospect; but the patio within was the special providence of Ugly Joe.
Water, for the internal or external application of which the proprietor had little use, was here lavished upon flowers. There were many kinds, and exceedingly bright colors, blended with all the skill with which a Navajo Indian weaves scarlets and yellows into his blanket. About those flowers Martha Gregory wandered with a watering-can in one hand and a short-handled hoe in the other. With the one she dealt life to the flowers. With the other she dealt death to the weeds—a faultless justice. She was taller than Ugly Joe, and her face was even homelier, with a cast of the Scandinavian expressed by high cheek-bones, small eyes, and a perfectly straight mouth so rigidly set that not the least blood-color showed in the lips.
At sight of Patricia Lauriston the hostess dropped her watering-can, and embraced her guest with the liberated arm. There was more strength in that one arm than in any two that Patricia had ever felt, and when she looked up, somewhat breathless, she surprised a smile on the lips of the Amazon. It was like a warm surprise of sunshine on a cloudy day—there was something generously enveloping about it. And Patricia smiled back. After all, there is only one smile for all women when they are kindly moved and genuine. Patricia and “Mother” Martha cast an arm about each other and wandered into the house, completely forgetful of Ugly Joe.
His wife was called “Mother” throughout ten thousand square miles because she had no children and had to vent her tenderness on flowers and broken-down horses and sick children. They still tell the story of how Mother Martha rode fifty miles in the space of a single night—fifty miles through a sand-storm that whipped her face raw—how her horse dropped—how she went on the last miles on foot—and reached the house of Jim Patrick. She saved three lives that time, for Mrs. Patrick gave birth to twins, and the lives of all three hovered at the brink of death for ten days, and were finally drawn back to life by the strong arm of Mother Martha.
That is only one of the stories they tell about Mother Martha. And if Patricia did not know these tales when she first saw her hostess, she must have guessed something of them. For when she passed through the door with Mother Martha, Patricia was extremely glad that she had taken her trip to the mountain-desert, and, as I have said, her arm was about the waist of the Amazon.
And that evening Patricia borrowed one of Mother Martha's gingham dresses, which flapped about her more loosely than a Kanaka woman's Holoku, and went into the kitchen to assist Martha. For the good wife would not keep a cook. No one, it seemed, could cook to please Ugly Joe except herself.
The master of the house had already despatched four riders in four various directions, and late that night, while Patricia sat at the piano—the pride of the house—playing everything from “Suwanee River” to the “Maple Leaf Rag,” the four messengers returned, and they brought with then four others. Now the messengers themselves were hardy cow-punchers, not overly gentle in feature or voice or manner, but they were missionary spirits of surpassing sweetness compared with the four accomplished ruffians they brought with them. The heart of a moving-picture director would have swelled almost to bursting if he could have seen them enter, for they were ideal figures for that episode in the third reel where the gang of villains pursues the innocent girl—the same episode, you know, where the gallant United States troopers in turn pursue the villains and arrive just in time to—well, that's the sort our four gunmen were.
Chick Woods came first. His face was built like some great transatlantic liner, chiefly towering hull with diminutive deck works. Upon that massive jaw and swelling jowl, the diminutive nose, little pig eyes and forehead lost under a descending scrag of black hair, were set rather as a suggestion of how the face might be finished off than as a necessary part of the countenance. All that any one would ever remember of Chick would be that jaw and the fanglike teeth and the bull-neck made for hanging on.
Behind him came his antithesis, Harry Yale. He was, as nearly as possible, a figure in one dimension—length. Both his breadth and his thickness were not worth consideration. He looked like a man who had gone without food for a month. There was the blaze of famine in his eyes, for instance, and his cheeks were so sunken that they pulled back the lips at the corners and made Harry Yale seem to smile. It seemed to Patricia the most unpleasant smile she had ever seen. She was fascinated by the man and could not take her eyes from him when he spoke, for with every utterance the great Adam's apple rolled up and down his throat, as if he were trying to swallow it and could never quite succeed.
As for Bob Riddle, who came third, he was far less repulsive than the other two. He was a half-breed, however, and he carried with him that suggestion of mysterious and inexhaustible malice which even a tenderfoot apprehends in a thoroughly bad Indian. He was quite dignified and very silent, which made him seem more venomous than ever.
Against the ugly background of the other three Jack Tucker was a perfect Apollo. In fact, his good looks had been the ruin of him. They had made him a spoiled child and out of a spoiled childhood he grew into a youth and manhood unable to accept the rebuffs of the world. When the world struck him he struck back, and having a heavy hand and a demon temper, he struck to kill. He had been a gambler for some years, but his killings grew greater than his winnings and he had to move on to fresh fields and pastures new. He was one of those fallen figures which excite no pity because his strength was still great enough to defy the world.
CHAPTER V.
THE TRAP IS SET.
AS these worthies filed in, the messengers who had brought them out of the distance, vanished through the open door behind them. The gun-fighters exchanged no kindly greetings.
“Well?” growled Chic Woods.
“Well?” snarled Harry Yale.
“Well?” grunted Bob Riddle.
“Well?” drawled Jack Tucker.
“Don't all ask me,” said Ugly foe, affable but a little shaken by this terse battery. “Here's the lady that got you brought here.”
The piano was in shadow in a corner of the room and the piano itself cast a night-deep, slanting shade over Patricia. She was only visible now, when she rose to greet the instruments of her will, and in rising the light from the lamp fell softly across her face and plashed a little spot of gold on her throat.
“Hell!' snorted Chic Woods at this sudden apparition, and then instantly dragged the hat from his head. The shaggy hair which sprawled in snaky, black locks made him trebly horrible. “'Scuse me, lady.”
“Certainly,” said Patricia, hunting through her mind for the words with which she must explain her purpose to these grim knights of the mountain-desert.
Here Jack Tucker, smoothing back his long hair and shifting his orange-colored bandanna, stepped forward, hat in hand, as a spokesman more befitting this occasion.
“Me and these other gents,” said Tucker graciously, “come here because Ugly Joe sent for us, and he's showed pretty much man to us. But if you want us, you can buy your chips now and start the game. We'll see that it's on the square. I'll be the guy on the stick myself.”
The parlance of the gambling-house was unfamiliar to Patricia, but she gathered the general meaning.
“Thank you,” she said, “my name is Patricia Lauriston—but Cousin Joe Gregory, there, says that I'll have to be known by a shorter name. He has suggested Pat.”
“Which I'll agree is a good name,” said Tucker. “I'm sure glad to know you. I'm Jack Tucker. This is Chic Woods, here's Harry Yale, and this is Bob Riddle.”
She managed to keep her smile steady and shook hands with them each in turn.
“Now,” she said to Ugly Joe, “shall I explain why we sent for them, or will you?”
“Pat,” said Ugly Joe, “first, last, and all the time this is your party, and run by yourself.”
“Very well,” she answered. “I've come from the East with a purpose in which I'll need the help of several men who can shoot straight and have the courage to fight. Cousin Joe suggested you. I want to hire you. It may be hard work, so that you can practically name your own prices.”
“Seeing it's you,” said the gallant Tucker, and he bowed, “I'm here willing to do any of my little specialties at half rates. What about you, boys?”
Their eyes had held like the bright eyes of four birds upon the deadly fascination of a snake. To men who ride alone in the mountain-desert, the very name “woman” is synonymous of purity, beauty, and grace; in the presence of Patricia they stood awed, and their admiration, and their grunt of assent, thrilled her more than any tribute from her cultured friends of the East.
“Wait a minute,” said Ugly Joe, “while I horn in a bit. What she wants is for you to get the Whisperer. I thought that would change you a bit!”
The effect of the name had been magical. Bob Riddle leaped back to the door and peered out into the night. Harry Yale and Jack Tucker jumped back to back and stood crouching a little, as though ready to fight a host of foes; while Chic Woods whipped out two guns and stood with them poised. Patricia shrank back against the wall.
“Steady,” called Ugly Joe, after he had enjoyed the full effect of his announcement for an instant. “I said she wanted you to get the Whisperer. I didn't say he was here.”
They relaxed, but cautiously. Riddle turned only partly from the door; Chic Woods restored his weapons to their holsters, but kept his right hand still in position for a lightning draw.
But what Patricia saw, oddly enough, was not the men before her, but him whose name had produced this panic among man-killers. She visioned him in one swift flare of sure knowledge—big, silent, neither handsome nor ugly, but simply dangerous!
“As a matter of fact,” said Patricia, “I am not even going to ask you to expose yourselves by hunting for the Whisperer through the hills. I simply want you to stay here and be ready to fight when the Whisperer comes. For he shall come. Will you stay?”
They stayed, and the next day Patricia rode alone toward Eagles. Behind her the trap was ready, a strong trap with four teeth of steel, and more, because in time of need all the cow-punchers of Cousin Joe Gregory could be summoned. What she needed to make that trap effective was to secure the efficient bait, and already she was tasting the joys of victory. She had no difficulty in finding the house of the Widow Morgan, and there, on the front veranda, sat Goggles. She was at a little distance when she spied him and knew him at once by the description. He wore riding-boots so highly polished that from the distance they glittered like mirrors, and his riding trousers were of a mouse-colored whip-cord, buttoned snugly below the narrow knees. His loose pongee shirt fluttered with the puff of wind, and he lay easily back in his chair, with his slender hands locked behind his head.
Patricia was irritated, and chiefly by the fact that he seemed so cool. She herself was very hot from the keenness of the sun and labor of the hard ride. She swung from her horse and mounted to the veranda. The nearer view merely proved what she had surmised from the distance. His face was very lean and pale, and behind the great, black-rimmed spectacles, large and pathetic eyes of soft brown stared out at the world. He was finished by a dapper little mustache. It did not extend clear across the upper lip, but was merely a decorative dab in the center. At her approach he turned his head carelessly and she noted that his face did not light as the faces of most men did when she came near.
With her whole heart Patricia despised him. If he had been himself a slayer of men she would almost have admired him—there is a place of esteem for a dangerous man; but this decorative, smooth, lithe sneak who lived in the shadow of a great outlaw's protection and like a jackal preyed on the leavings of the lion's meal—her disgust stormed up strongly in her throat. It made her face hard, indeed.
Seeing her pause by him, Goggles arose, with just that touch of lingering hesitancy which indicates the courtesy of habit and breeding rather than the attention of natural kindliness. He rose, smiled automatically, and offered his chair. Without the slightest hesitancy Patricia slipped into it and sat calmly staring up to him.
If she had hoped to irritate him, however, she was totally disappointed. He did not even seem surprised, but leaned against the rail of the veranda, brushing his little mustache with a very slender finger-tip, and looking for all the world as if he had been merely keeping the chair in trust for her. Patricia was quite sure that the man's blood was no warmer than that of a fish. She pictured him, in one of those quick visions of hers, fawning and cringing in the presence of the Whisperer. Indeed, being the servant of such a grim master gave the fellow a sort of dignity. She had to admit it unwillingly. She could only wonder that a lone rider of the mountain-desert could choose so despicable a tool. The man was hardly taller than herself and certainly not a great deal heavier. The only admirable physical characteristic about him was a certain suggestion of lightness for speed. She had seen famous sprinters who had the same delicate, almost perfectly round wrists and ankles, the same marvelously slender hands and feet. His foot, in fact, though it was somewhat longer, was hardly a jot wider than her own.
These details Patricia gathered in that first steady, rather insolent stare.
Then she said:“Thank you for the chair, Mr. St. Gore. I've just come in from a long ride—very hot, you know, and a little tired.”
“Ah!” drawled St. Gore without the slightest meaning in his voice, and then, acting upon sudden inspiration: “By jove, the Widow Morgan has just made a pitcher of delightfully cool lemonade. May I bring you a glass?”
“Thanks!“” said Patricia. “No.”
“No? It's really very palatable lemonade—not made with the wretched extract.”
“Indeed?” said Patricia.
“Quite so,” babbled Goggles, “and the pitcher is so cold—well, there's frost on it, you know!”
The description sent a burning pang of thirst down Patricia's throat and plunging hotly into her vitals, but now that she had first refused she could not well change her mind. Unquestionably she hated the fellow with her whole soul.
“My name,” she broke in “is Patricia Lauriston.”
She waited for the name to take effect—waited for the guilty start—the flush—the pallor of the coward. Instead he merely stared curiously—a faint curiosity—toward her, and then past her, as if he were lost at the instant in the drifting of a pale, far-off cloud.
“Really,” murmured Goggles, “I'm so happy to know you, Miss Lauriston.”
Patricia leaned forward to give the first sharp home-stroke.
CHAPTER VI.
BAIT FOR THE TRAP.
“I AM the cousin,” she said, “of that Lauriston whose murder you accomplished through the Whisperer.”
At this he started, indeed. Not sharply; it was merely a sudden and rather hurt glance down at her face, studying her as if he wondered what manner of creature she might be.
“Oh, dear!” sighed Goggles at last. “You are not going to bring up that hideous old affair?”
“I have come several thousand miles for that exact purpose,” said Patricia, and the rage which she had been controlling took her by the throat like a gripping hand, so that her voice trembled and went small. For her whole soul revolted at the thought of that stalwart cousin of hers done to death through this paltry cur. She concluded: “And having come so far, I'm certainly going to do my best to bring matters to a crisis.” .
Goggles sank back against the rail and trailed slender fingers across that broad, pale forehead.
“Every one,” he complained drearily, “has been simply wretched to me since the death of that vulgar fellow, and now you come. Well, I'm very glad that you know it was the Whisperer, and not I, who committed the murder.”
“No,” said Patricia with a fine disdain, “all your part was to call on the blood-hound and set him at the trail of a man you did not have the heart to face by yourself.”
“Oh!” said Goggles, and shrank a little away from her. “You don't seem to like me, do you?”
She could not help laughing. The inanity of the fellow was both disgusting and comic. Her laugh jarred to an abrupt stop.
“Do you think it strange, Mr. St. Gore?”
“Really, you know,” said St. Gore, “I've tried most awfully not to offend you. If my manners have been bad I know you will excuse me. You see, I'm a little troubled with absent-mindedness.”
“H-m!” grumbled Patricia, and she seemed very masculine and formidable as she frowned thoughtfully down at him. “The more I see of you, Mr. St. Gore, I wish that I could de to you what I am going to do to the Whisperer.”
He was frankly, guilelessly interested at once.
“Oh, are you going to do something to the Whisperer?”
“I am going to see him captured,” said Patricia smoothly, “and either shot down or else hanged from the highest cottonwood-tree on the ranch.”
“Dear me!” cried Goggles, distressed, “you're such a violent person, aren't you?”
“And I'm almost sorry to have it done,” went on Patricia, “because something in me admires the man in spite of his crimes. At least he has strength and courage and power of action. I wish—I wish that some one of your nature were to be in his place.”
“Like me!” gasped poor Goggles, and he edged further away along the rail.
“Stand where you are!” cried Patricia sternly.
He stopped with a jerk, and his eyes widened.
“But I can't do that,” she went on, and paused to meditate.
“I wonder,” began St. Gore timidly, as if he feared that she would snap at him in the middle of his question—“I wonder how you will attack the Whisperer. He has never killed a woman—but I suppose he would—he's such a terrible fellow. Quite uncontrollable, you know.”
“Perhaps,” said Patricia, “you have heard of Chic Woods, Harry Yale, Jack Tucker, and Bob Riddle?”
“Oh, yes,” murmured Goggles, “and I don't think you could have named four rougher men. Really, you know, they are the sort one doesn't mention—in certain places.”
“I have hired them,” said Patricia calmly, “to do the work which the law could not or would not perform.”
She considered him again, thoughtfully.
“And in some way I'm going to use you, Mr. St. Gore, but just how I can't tell.”
The man seemed to have a special talent for asinine expression of face—utter emptiness of eye. But now a dawn of intelligence lighted his eyes.
“By jove!” he cried, and straightening he clapped his hands together and laughed with soft glee to himself. “I have it!”
“Have what?” asked Patricia.
“You see,” explained Goggles eagerly, “it's been useful now and then, but on the whole an awful nuisance to have the Whisperer trailing me about. I'd give almost anything to have the rude fellow—er—disappear!”
“You would?”
“So suppose I go out to your ranch and act—well, as a sort of bait for your trap. The Whisperer is sure to follow me. He's like my shadow, in fact.”
“Do you mean to say,” said Patricia slowly, “that you would actually help to betray him—your friend—your benefactor—no matter what he has been to the rest of the world?”
“Now,” said Goggles deprecatingly, “you are thinking hard things of me again, aren't you? But the Whisperer is an awful burden for any one—and I'm quite too nervous to have him always around. It would be a most enormous relief to get rid of him.”
She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath. The shameless ingratitude and treachery of the fellow blinded her.
“But how,” she said, when she could speak again, “could I be sure that once on the ranch you would not sneak away the first time the Whisperer approached you?”
“That's very simple,” said Goggles brightly, “I'll give you my word not to leave until you say that I may go.”
“And you won't ride out and tell the Whisperer all of our plan? Bah! he would wring it out of you through fear!”
“Well,” said Goggles thoughtfully, “I suppose he might, but that would only make him stay the closer. He doesn't fear anything, you know, and he would laugh at the thought of any four men taking him. Even such men as you have. Did you say Jack Tucker is one of them?”
“He is,” said Patricia, and in spite of herself she began to almost admire the catlike cunning of the dapper little Easterner. “I see your plan, and I suppose that a man like the Whisperer would take the challenge of my—trap—as a sort of sporting proposition. Being your friend, he would try to make me release you—try to make me give you your freedom.”
She straightened, her eyes shining.
“And that would bring him at last face to face with me. I don't ask anything more.”
“You take my breath—you really do,” said Goggles, “but if the plan suits you, suppose I go pack my grip? I'm all ready to start.”
“Certainly,” said Patricia, and her scornful glance followed him through the door.
He reappeared, carrying a bulky suit-case, tightly strapped and bulging at the sides. His horse was led around at the same time and the suit-case strapped behind the saddle securely.
On the way out he had little to say. He seemed more amazed than intimidated, and at this she wondered, until she was able to explain it to herself through the fact that the man trusted all things implicitly to the Whisperer, and had grown so accustomed to the infallibility of the outlaw that he did not dream of worrying over any predicament. In fact, there seemed no place for worry in the mindlessness of the fellow. Worry, after all, suggests thought, and that was something, apparently, which never burdened the brain of Mr. St. Gore. Once he brought his horse, a fine animal, to a sharp halt in order that he might gape upon a cloud of singular shape which floated down the western sky. Now and then he broke his silence to speak to his horse 'in @ conversational manner, as one might speak to any rational being.
To Patricia, in fact, looking from the fine, high-held head of the horse to the bespectacled face of the rider, it seemed that the brute was by far the higher type of animal. They were in sight of Ugly Joe's place before the fop directly addressed her.
He said: “I presume that I shall have protection against these—er—ruffians of yours, Miss Lauriston?”
“I shall personally,” she answered, “be your guarantee.”
“Will you really?” he queried gratefully. “Awfully thrilling to have your interest, you know!”
She looked at him sharply. In almost any other man the speech would have been a subtle jest, but his face was more blankly serious than she had seen it, as yet. They dismounted at the central entrance, opening on the patio. Here Goggles cried out sharply and ran forward a few steps with his arms outthrown. He whirled sharply on Patricia, his face ecstatic.
“Miss Lauriston!” he cried. “I've been thinking it rather queer of you to bring me away out here, but now I thank you—I positively do! I haven't seen flowers like these since I left—”
His arms dropped—his face grew grave and almost drawn.
“I beg your pardon?” queried Patricia lightly.
“I beg yours,” answered Vincent St. Gore, and he bowed with something which almost approached a gentleman's quiet dignity. “I shouldn't have commenced a sentence which I may not finish.”
To Patricia it was as if a cloth of bright, simple colors were suddenly reversed, and on the other side she saw some marvelously intricate design; so much one touch of gravity did to all her preconceptions of the man, and all her knowledge of him as she had seen him this day. Ugly Joe, crossing from one side of the patio to the other, stopped short.
“Hello!” he called. “You got your bird, eh, Pat?”
“You see him,” she answered.
Ugly Joe approached to within reaching distance of Goggles, who adjusted his spectacles and leaned forward to peer at the newcomer. Ugly Joe grew ugly indeed.
“Listen to me, my hearty,” snarled the rancher, who had been at sea in his time, and whose walk still oddly suggested, at times, the heaving deck of an imaginary ship. “Listen to me: You're out here because the lass wants you here for reasons of her own. Maybe she's told you about them. Now I'll tell you one other thing: Don't be lingering around when you find me alone. I can stand the sight of you, maybe, when there's witnesses near by, but when I see you alone I want to fix my fingers in that skinny windpipe of yours. Understand? You damned, sneaking cutthroat!”
And Ugly Joe turned on his heel, after a farewell glare, and stalked on toward the nearest door with his wobbly stride, lifting high to meet the imaginary deck.
CHAPTER VII.
GOGGLES TALKS.
“MY word!” sighed Goggles. “Who is that person?”
“That,” said Patricia coldly, “is my cousin, Joe Gregory.”
“Isn't he the rough chap, though?”
“Ah!” she cried, with a sudden, overwhelming burst of disgust. “Can you call yourself a man? You would shame a dog—a creeping, whining—dog!”
And she turned and ran from him. She was shuddering with shame and horror in the thought that such a craven, such a spineless cur, could be a man, walk and talk and think like a man, and yet be at heart such a travesty on all noble qualities of a man. More sickening. because his admiration of the flowers a moment before had made him almost akin to him—had brought a sudden softening and sympathy into her heart. 'She despised herself for it now—loathed herself, as though she had touched the face of a leper, and the touch had made her unclean, forever.
By contrast she drew the figure of the Whisperer. Perhaps at some time in his career a service had been rendered him by this cravenly scoundrel, St. Gore, and now, to pay the debt; he constituted himself a strong and invisible shield between the craven and the world. More and more details of the Whisperer's character were creeping up strongly in her imagination. He was large, undoubtedly, since so many tales were told of his prowess. And the whispering voice, so horrible to hear, was undoubtedly the result of some incurable affliction. She had heard of men with consumption of the throat, which affected their vocal chords so that their voices became like that ascribed to the Whisperer.
Without doubt the man had come to the Southwest to be cured of his affliction by the purer, drier air. To support himself he had been forced into a life of outlawry. Then this sneaking dapper fiend, St. Gore, tracked the man whom he had befriended in some small thing years before, and lived off the earnings of the Whisperer's daredevil depredations. In the mean time the outlaw was dying slowly of his malady, but would be terrible until the end.
This was the story which grew up of itself in her thoughts, until it seemed to her that she could not bear to face St. Gore again. The temptation to shoot him down—kill him like a snake—would be too great.
It was into this stormy mood of hers that harmonious music ran. In fact, it was so akin to her thoughts of the moment that she hardly noticed it at first, and only gradually it grew out distinctly upon her. It was some one playing on the piano in the distant room, the Revolutionary Etude by Chopin, and playing it with consummate strength and mastery.
Not an easy thing to do, as she knew by experience, but this musician played with easy perfection. The difficult bass, which must roll, but not thunder, swept by in a vast rhythm like great ground-swells which roll along and toss the ship, and in turn block out either horizon and tower darkly into the heart of the sky. She had seen such waves, and she saw them again in the music. The treble darted across the scheme of harmony like sharp, stabbing bursts of lightning, illuminating the whole scene. The Revolutionary Etude—a study in conflict, in an ominous and rising danger like the passion which had held her a moment before.
She left her room and wandered toward the place from which the music came, paused at the door, and then went sick with disgusted disappointment.
It was Vincent St. Gore who sat at the piano. He turned a blank face upon her, finished his passage faultlessly, and then rose.
“The bass,” he said, “is in good shape, but the whole upper register is a shade out of tune—flat.”
She merely stared helplessly at him. He had passed to an Indian basket suspended from the ceiling near a window and holding a flower-pot full of crimson blossoms marked with streaks of jet. The large petals were like velvet. Now he turned the basket so that the sunshine in turn streamed softly over each flower—turned it with a lingering delight, and the expression of his face was such as she had seen when he first saw the flowers in the patio.
“Isn't it strange?” he said, turning to her, “that such a rough creature as your cousin Gregory should keep flowers. Or perhaps it's his wife?”
“I think,” said Patricia dryly, “that they are both capable of appreciating flowers.”
“Really?” he said, and as usual, when aroused, he shifted his spectacles and peered through them at her. “Very odd, though, isn't it, that they should have the passion?”
“Why?” she asked. 'It was a burden even to listen to him, and a trial of patience.
“Because,” he answered, “it's out of harmony. They love one beautiful thing, and all the rest is discord.”
“Perhaps,” said Patricia, “they have other qualities just as important.”
“Impossible,” said Goggles, and shook his head decisively. “There are no others as important as the love of beauty.”
“If you feel that way,” said Patricia, “I wonder that you can tolerate these people.”
“Quite right,” answered Goggles, nodding seriously, “but I don't tolerate them, you see. I see no more of them than I do of individual clouds when all the sky is dark. I don't talk like this to them—oh, never!”
“It would be unhealthy for you if you did, perhaps,” said Patricia scornfully.
“Would it?” said Goggles, and canted his head thoughtfully to one side. “Yes, I suppose these creatures would resent criticism with physical violence.”
He shrugged his shoulders; it was a shudder of aversion which shook his entire body.
“However,” he said, “I have never bothered talking with them about these things. It would be like sowing the wind, don't you think?”
“Exactly,” said Patricia, “and like reaping the whirlwind afterward, eh?“
“I don't quite follow you there,” said Goggles, “unless you mean that they might actually strike me? Dear me! I suppose that is possible. One never knows what to expect. Not in these wilds. However, with you there is some difference.”
“Hope for me?” asked Patricia.
He considered her with that thoughtfully canted head.
“I should really warn you,” he smiled, “that I've acquired a brutal frankness out here in the mountain-desert.”
“I'm so glad,” said Patricia. “It's the one—”
She stopped, but Goggles finished the sentence smoothly for her.
“The one manly characteristic you've found in me? Quite so! Oh, I don't in the least mind people saying such things to me. I've grown quite used to them.”
And he smirked at her. She had to grip her hands to keep from striking him across the thin-lipped mouth.
“You were saying,” she remarked, “that there may be a hope for me?”
“Did I say that? I didn't mean to. No, a woman rarely develops. She is, on the whole, a fixed quantity, and only varies in vanity. You don't mind, do you? I'm quite impersonal.”
“My dear Mr. St. Gore,” sighed Patricia, “nothing you say can possibly offend me. Go on!”
“Now isn't that comfortable!” breathed the little man. “I foresee some charming chats with you. You have possibilities, I should say, rather of appreciation than of execution. You would not in the least surprise me, for instance, if I heard you discuss an art with intelligence, but I should be much astounded if you performed anything with distinction. You follow me?”
“H-m!” said Patricia.
“You will attempt to remedy this defect since I have called it to your attention, but after a few years you will see that I am right about it; a woman never varies, except in degree. You will abandon the effort to create.”
She was beginning to forget what the man looked like. She was hearing only the light, smooth voice. She was drifting away into the sea of the discussion.
“There are other things,” said Patricia desperately. “There are other things I can do. There is a world of action.”
“A world of action,” said the little man serenely. “You can give birth to children, love your husband because he provides the food for yourself and your offspring, and rock a cradle. Within whose limits there is almost nothing to which you may not aspire in the world of action. That must be quite clear to you.”
“H-m!” said Patricia.
“But after all,” went on Goggles, “what is the world of action? What becomes of it? What do we know of the great financiers and bridge-builders and lawmakers and statesmen? You can number on your two hands the few to whom certain poets have deigned to give immortality. No, your practical man, your man of action, rots away into oblivion as rapidly as his Name rots away on the headstone of his grave.
“What is left of Egypt? The mind that conceived the Sphinx and the author of the story of “Cinderella.” What of the heroes of Greece, her captains of industry? They are gone except as some poet names them on a random page. And the poets of Greece? You can run the list into scores. We read them as we read Milton and Shakespeare. Well, to get down to modern days, consider Shakespeare. Now, can you tell me, off-hand, who commanded the English fleet against the Armada?”
“No,” said Patricia, “I can't.”
“It was a certain Lord Howard, I think. But surely in his day he was considered much greater than the obscure fellow who pushed a pen and acted the part of a ghost and finally settled down in a pleasant little village to die like a commonplace farmer. Yes, in those days no man would have hesitated to choose between the fate of a Lord Howard and that of a Shakespeare. But time is the acid test. Time rusts away all your strong iron and leaves only the gold untouched—only the gold—only the beauty. It is the one thing you cannot resist.
“For instance, I called you out of a distant part of the house with music. Because I play that Etude in a certain way you have to listen to me although you despise me, d'you see? And after I've gone on you'll think over what I've said, though you're too proud to ask more questions now.”
She slumped into a chair.
“I'm not too proud,” she said. “I do despise you—but I want to listen.”
“Well,” said Goggles, “I like to talk, for that matter. Almost any audience will do for me when I get started. Even my horse!”
He smiled, and, musing upon this absurdity, he drew out a monogramed cigarette-case, and offered it to her. She refused sharply.
“Ah,” said Goggles, withdrawing the case and selecting and lighting his smoke, “you don't smoke? Now, that's rarely stupid of you. You miss a great opportunity; nothing like smoking to set off hands like yours.”
She folded her arms to conceal those hands.
“Now!” he said. “You wish to seem angry, but secretly you're a little pleased, aren't you?”
“Yes,” said the girl, “I like appreciation, no matter from whom it comes.”
“Not so well said,” answered the dictator of tastes. “Injudicious appreciation is worse than useless. It clogs the mind with inaccuracies. The common herd, for instance, thought much of both Tennyson and Browning in their day.”
“But you dislike them?”
“Dislike them? No. When I was a boy I rather enjoyed them. Then I discovered that Tennyson has nothing to say and knows exceedingly well how to say it; while Browning has a great deal to say, but was never able to utter a single sustained rhythm. Now, in your remark of a moment ago you were trying to make a hit at my comment about audiences. You missed my point. One talks with a companion; one talks of an audience.”
“You are certainly very clear,” said the girl.
“Insultingly so?”
“You could never insult me.”
“Only weary you, I suppose. And now?”
“I'm intensely interested. Because you pay some attention to the subject which most fascinates me—myself.”
The eyes of Goggles flashed with enjoyment.
“That's bully,” he chuckled. “Simply bully! You are interesting, but not in the way men have told you.”
“Oh!” said Patricia.
He was like a dissector, cutting toward the heart of her being, naming each muscle as he passed it.
“You have,” said the merciless critic, “the three most important qualities for a woman, their importance ranking in the order named: a sound body—apparently—a beautiful face, and a receptive mind. You have also, in the order named, the three greatest vices of modern woman: ambition, discontent, and respect for your mind. You are interesting through the clash of qualities.”
“And you are under the impression that I will become—”
“Either a virtuous wife and the discontented mother of many children, or the mistress of a great man, and the discontented mother of barren thoughts.”
She sank further back in her chair, regarding him with awe and aversion. It seemed to Patricia that the book of her future was being read with infallible wisdom.
“Which had you rather be?” smiled Goggles.
“I had rather die than be either!” cried Patricia.
“Ah!” said the little man, and raised a forefinger. “Then there is hope for you!”
And after that she could not get another word from him.
CHAPTER VIII.
A MESSAGE FROM THE NIGHT.
ODDLY enough that interview increased her respect for the Whisperer rather than for St. Gore. She saw another reason now why the outlaw should cling to this dapper little fop and extend over him the dark cloak of his protection. It was because the outlaw had been a man of culture and had been ostracized from the paths of civilized men. All that he saved from the wreckage was the friendship and occasional meetings with this St. Gore, this absurd little dude with his cold, keen mind.
If she did not utterly despise St. Gore now, she looked upon him as men look upon some ingenious mechanism which does the work of a man—and yet is not a man. She felt almost as impersonally as this about St. Gore.
Apparently he had the most complete trust in the protection of the Whisperer. For instance, when he sat opposite the four gun-fighters at the table that night, he looked at them rather with curiosity than with fear, and studied them with such an intent look that Patricia wished for the tenth time that he would lay aside those absurd, owl-like spectacles.
Indeed, it was the spectacles which gave most of the folly to the face of Goggles. Without them it would have been an interesting, intellectually handsome face. With them, it became a mere mask of inanity. However, she had known men like this before, men with minds, but no bodies—men dead below the brain. A typical product of one phase of the twentieth century.
The gun-fighters regarded Goggles with a curiosity fully equal to his own and much more openly expressed. They were like four great hunting-dogs surrounding the weak, defenseless cub of the bear, but daring not touch it for fear of the terrible coming of the dam. They measured Goggles across his broad forehead and his narrow cheeks—they measured him across his slender shoulders and through his thin chest. Once Chic Woods, speaking in an aside like a mutter of thunder to Bob Riddle, stretched out his fingers and then closed them slowly—a suggestive gesture, as if he were crushing some fragile object filled with life. Yet for some time no one directly addressed Goggles; the cloak of his master's awful power fell like an invisible sense of awe about him.
Finally, however, Jack Tucker said: “Maybe you don't know, Goggles, that I've figured out who the Whisperer is?”
“How extremely interesting!” said Goggles, and smiled benignantly upon the ruffian. “Do you really, though!”
“You're damn right I do—'scuse me, lady,” said Tucker, “and there was one beside me that knew—old Mort Lauriston.”
“Well, well,” said Goggles, “you've no idea how interested the Whisperer will be when I tell him that his identity has been penetrated.”
“Whatever that means,” growled Tucker, “but you can tell the old bird that he's known, all right. Maybe you'd like to hear the story?”
“Indeed!” drawled Goggles with enthusiasm.
“By all means,” said Patricia.
“It was back a few years when the first paying ore was struck over by the Muggyon Hills,” said Tucker. “I was laying about Eagles when one day old Mort Lauriston came driving up to me and says he'd like to have me slide out into the hills with him to a place where he thought he'd got the right color, but he wanted to get my opinion before he got his claim papers.
“I climbed a hoss and we went out into the hills, and there, right on the place where Mort had been digging; was Pa.”
“Pa?” queried Patricia.
“I was coming to that. There was a chap come out to Eagles from the East. Awful green tenderfoot. He said his name was Peter Askworthy Howe, but the initials on his suit-case was 'P. A. H.,' so we called him Pa right off the jump.
“Wasn't a bad sort, laying aside the funny way he talked. Anyway, it was Pa who'd come along and seen the marks of Mort's digging. He'd opened up the stuff himself, and being a rock-hound he seen the first glance that there was plenty of color—real stuff. So he staked out a claim. We come down and allowed to him that Mort had the first jump on that spot. He told us to go to—well, not just in them words, him being particular polite, always.
“He allowed that he was going into Eagles to get his papers. Well, we knew that he'd beat us on a ride, because he had a pretty nice piece of hoss-flesh with him. He climbed into the saddle and then I shot the hoss.
“Sort of peeved this Pa, because he ups and grabs his gun. Which was some foolish move, considering how fast Mort was with his six. He put three chunks of lead into Pa's chest inside a space the size of your palm. Of course the tenderfoot didn't have no chance.
“He didn't die for a minute, and before he kicked out, he rolls himself over on his back—he was a big gent—and pulls himself up on his hands.
“'Lauriston,' he says, 'you and Tucker will never enjoy the money you make out of this mine. My brother will track me, and he'll learn who killed me. He'll kill you, my fine fellows, and if you started riding now you could never ride far enough away or hide so well that you could get away from him.'
“With that he kicked out. Now, I got a considerable respect for what a dying man says, and I allow that the Whisperer is the brother of old Pa. Yep, his name is Howe and he's filled one part of his bet by getting Mort Lauriston. The other part is to get me. I knew the Whisperer was on my trail, and that's why I've been so scarce around these parts lately. I figured he'd a good chance of bumping me off while I was alone. But now that I've got these three bunkies I guess he's out of luck. What say, Chic?”
'Tl tell the world he's out of luck!” growled Chic.
“Damn his eyes!” broke in Ugly Joe. “When he finds them, he finds me with 'em. Listen to the wind, lads! Glad we're in port to-night!”
For the gale had risen suddenly and now made the stanch dobe walls quiver time and again, and little drafts set the flames jumping in the lamps. Mrs. Gregory rose to fasten the shades on the western and windward side of the house, and, opening a window to do this, a piece of paper, evidently inserted under the edge of the window for this very purpose, whipped from the sill and came fluttering across the room like a white bird, settling gently on the center of the table.
Jack Tucker, cursing softly, leaned forward and snatched up the paper, unfolded it, and read aloud, slowly, with a grim-set face:
- “Gents, I've been waiting for you a long time. I never expected to get you all together. Harry Yale, you come first.
He tossed it down for examination by any who cared to look. Gingerly, like men touching deadly poison, they raised the little paper one by one and examined the clumsy, scrawling writing. It was backhand, and the letters were formed with the same crude care that a child of seven uses.
“At least,” said Patricia thoughtfully—and she and Goggles were the only calm people in-the room, “it proves one thing. The Whisperer is not your man Howe. This is some uneducated man from the mountain-desert. Look at his writing! Isn't that a sufficient proof?”
“Ma'am,” said Chic Woods hoarsely, “nothing proves anything about the Whisperer. I don't mind a man—but a damned ghost—”
His eyes traveled across to Harry Yale. The tall man stood like one transfixed, swallowing hard, so that the great Adam's apple jumped up and down his throat. Through that bronze tan he could not show pallor, but his lips seemed to have grown harder set, and they were pulled toward the hollows of his cheeks by the ghastliest of grins. In the silence that followed every glance turned finally upon Harry Yale.
He stood it for a moment, and then in a sudden fury he pushed back his chair, rose, and smashed his great, bony hand down on the table.
“Am I dead already?” he roared. “I ain't any ghost now, am I? Look somewhere's else—and to hell with you all!”
He strode to the door, hesitated with his hand on the knob, and then jerked it suddenly open, and stood tense, staring into the dark beyond. He closed the door, disappearing into the further room. Chic Woods raised a shaking hand and mopped his forehead.
CHAPTER IX.
THE SECOND AND THIRD MESSAGES.
PATRICIA, with her four gun-fighters, felt like a general with mighty forces to direct. It was she who planned the campaign for the next day. She schemed in this way: First of all, Goggles was almost certain to use his freedom at once and ride out to meet the Whisperer, whom he would supply with accurate information concerning all that went on in the house. Her plan was to trail Goggles when he rode out, using Harry Yale to do the trailing, because Harry had now the most vital reason for wishing to get at the great outlaw. One man could probably trail the inexperienced Goggles very easily, and the other three in turn would follow Yale at a safe distance, scattered out on either side of him.
In case Yale were to find the Whisperer they could gallop in at once to his assistance, enveloping the outlaw.
She disclosed her plan to the four men, and they agreed readily. Any plan was a good plan to them. What they wanted was action, and quick action to get at the common enemy.
She proved a true prophet. Almost immediately after breakfast Goggles sauntered out toward the barn and a few minutes later was riding toward the hills at a brisk gallop. He was not out of sight before Harry Yale, spurring at every stride, raced after him, and behind Harry, at a short interval, came his three companions.
Patricia, from the kitchen door, watched them disappear with a smile of content. The Whisperer, certainly, would expect some dilatoriness in the campaign against him, some waiting for his nearer approach, some elaborately calculated ambuscade. This quick action, nine chances out of ten, would throw him off his guard. And in the presence of four men like Yale and the others, one mistake would be the last. She felt a queer pain, as well, at the thought that through her this wild scourge should be removed from the mountain-desert. No matter how terrible he might be, it would be like the shooting of an eagle—a grim thing to see the air robbed of its lord and its tyrant.
By noon the riders had not returned. In the dusk of the evening Woods, Riddle, and Tucker, hot, weary, discomfitted, trotted up to the barn and came in silence to the house. In the first wild burst of speed Harry Yale, better mounted than the others, and riding without caution, had outstripped the others, and they had lost him in the windings of the hills. All the rest of the day they stalked him, but could never get his trail again. They told this tale to Ugly Joe. To Patricia they would not speak at all. She had been the general, and she had failed her army in time of need. For her own part, a sense of guilt oppressed her. Somewhere out there in the gathering dark the tall form of Harry Yale must lie motionless. Over it the buzzards, perhaps, were already gathering.
In the midst of her despair there was a shout from outside the house, and she ran out to see the form of a horseman rapidly maturing through the dark.
“Hey, Harry!” called the chorus of his bunkies.
But after a moment, a soft, thin voice answered: “Halloo, there!”
“Goggles!' groaned Chic Woods.
“Goggles!” said Patricia, and she wished him heartily a thousand leagues under the honest earth.
He came, trailing his feet with weariness, having put up his horse in the barn.
“My word!” sighed Goggles. “Will you believe that I was lost in those wretched hills? Yes, indeed! I should hardly have found the house if I hadn't seen the lights at last! Think of wandering all night through those hills! I'm going straight to my room!”
And he went. The others settled down at the entrance to the patio to wait. They were silent; for an hour the only sound and sigh was the occasional scratch and blue spurt of a match. They were thinking of Harry Yale, and they were thinking of death.
But at the very moment that Ugly Joe finally rose and turned toward the house, they caught the patter of trotting hoofs through the night, hoofs that clapped the earth more loudly, chugging in the sand at last directly before the house as the horse came to a halt. They were too excited to challenge the rider.
“Halloo!” called the voice of Harry Yale.
A happy cheer answered him. Woods and Riddle ran toward him.
“Stay where y'are!” barked Harry Yale. “I got an oath not to stop with you.”
“You met him?” called Patricia.
“I'm saying nothin' except this thing,” answered Harry Yale: “Bob Riddle, you're the next to go. That's straight from the Whisperer.”
“Wait!” called Chic Woods. “Yale, y'ain't going to leave us up in the air like this?”
“Chic, if you come near me I'll start a gun-play. I'm under 'n oath higher 'n heaven and deeper 'n hell. S'long.”
And the hoofs started again, and chugged softly away through the night, fainter, fainter, until the last patter died out. As for the men, none of them stirred, but Patricia fled back into the house and found Mother Martha.
“I want to stay with you to-night!” she pleaded. “I'm afraid!”
“Of what, honey?” asked Mother Martha.
“Of ghosts!” said Patricia. “Of ghosts!”
“I'm older 'n you, Patty,” answered Martha, “and I've seen a pile more of the ways of the mountain-desert. You'll never get the Whisperer this way. He'll hunt down men one by one, just the way he did Harry Yale to-day. Poor Harry Yale. He's done for. To-morrow he'll take water from a Chinaman. That's the way of the Whisperer. If he don't kill the body of a man, he kills the heart, which is worse, a lot.”
“I won't give it up!” said Patricia. “I daren't give it up!”
“Why not, honey? Who elected you a man-hunter?”
“It's the first thing I've tried by myself—the first real work. I've got to win! and I will win, because he can't beat me until I release St. Gore from his parole with my own lips.”
“Patty,” said Mother Martha, “I've seen stranger things than that happen on the mountain-desert.”
Not a comforting thought for Patricia to carry away to her bed. She lay awake long considering it. For how, after all, could the Whisperer force her against her will to retract the parole of St. Gore? Perhaps at the point of his revolver; perhaps by striking down Ugly Joe—and even Mother Martha. Yes, to the Whisperer neither man nor woman made a difference.
When she finally slept it was only to dream of a great weight that pressed down on her, an invisible burden that beat against her out of the thin air like the wings of some tremendous, ethereal moth, suffocating her, pressing her resistlessly to the ground, killing her in the very sight of her friends.
She woke the next morning with little violet circles painted beneath her eyes, and in her throat a steady burning. The rest of the household was already at the breakfast-table, in silence, and when she entered every one looked up, but no one spoke, except Goggles. He was more dapper than ever, and seemed to have perfectly recuperated from the effects of his long ride of the day before. There was even a little touch of pink in his usually colorless cheeks.
He rose blithely at the sight of Patricia and pulled back her chair. Her loathing of him rose to a physical horror. She could not sit down while the man stood behind the chair.
“Thank you,” she said heavily, at last. “Won't you take your chair again?”
“Oh, said Goggles, “of course, if you wish.”
She looked across to Ugly Joe and met a scowl in reply.
“What is it?” she asked.
No one would speak, at first. Then she noted for the first time that Bob Riddle was not there.
“The Whisperer,” she gasped. “Last night?”
There came a peculiar, hysterical laugh from Chic Woods, and his little pig-eyes wandered wildly. He tossed a scrap of paper across to her.
“I found that tied on the horn of my saddle this morning. Maybe you can make it out for yourself.”
She read:
- Gents, I'm gone. Nothing this side of hell can bring me back,:so don't try. All I can say is: Chic Woods, your turn comes next, and God help you.
She read it again, and this time aloud, and as she finished Chic Woods sprang up, cursing hideously. He was plainly hysterical with fear.
“I start myself,” he cried. “Tucker, if you're wise, you start with me. Any man I'll fight, but this damned ghost—”
He turned and fled through the doorway. He was never seen again, it is said, in the mountain-desert. Whether he met the Whisperer and death on his flight, or whether he simply left forever his old haunts, will never be known.
CHAPTER X.
THE MESSAGE TO PATRICIA.
AS for Jack Tucker, he leaned forward heavily on the table and followed the flight of Chic Woods with haunted eyes.
“For me there ain't no use in running,” he said slowly. “I can see that plain. I can see why the Whisperer didn't shoot up the rest, but just scared 'em off. He didn't want 'em; he was wanting only me! He is Howe, by God, and first he got Mort and now he'll get me! He's cleared out the rest—well, if he gets me, he'll get me in this house—d'ye hear? And nobody 'll make me leave it! I got two guns that shoot straight and clean, and from now on I eat in my room—d'ye hear?”
To his glowering eyes every one who sat at the table, apparently, had that moment become an enemy. He pushed back his chair, and backed from the room with his hands dropped to the butts of his guns, and through the rest of the day nothing could induce him to leave his room, until the supper-hour. It was Mother Martha who finally brought him down. The day of self-imprisonment had changed him. He came down with a soft and cautious step, like some beast of prey, and he fixed on Ugly Joe, who passed him, a curious stare. Joe said afterward that he thought for an instant that Jack Tucker had lost his mind. At any rate, the gun-fighter went down quite quietly to the dining-room and accepted the chair which Mother Martha pulled back for him, and ate the food she placed before him.
No one but Mother Martha is responsible for the story of what followed in the next few minutes; but the word of Mother Martha, hitherto, has been more easily passed than current gold.
She was much worried about Tucker, she said, for when a man shuts himself up with a worry or a fear he's very apt to lose his mind. It was for that reason that she persuaded him to come down to the dining-room. The man was apparently in a panic of wild, soul-consuming fear. Not the sort of fear that makes men run, but the kind that makes them more dangerous than maniacs.
She tried to encourage him at first, telling him that he was afraid of nothing. She assured him, finally, that the Whisperer had not a reason to injure him any more than the outlaw had already injured the other three gunmen. For the bullets which killed the man Howe had been fired by Mort Lauriston. She had scarcely finished this assurance, when Tucker leaned across the table toward her and said in a ghastly murmur: “You fool! D'you think that I'd of told the truth before Goggles, that damned spy of the Whisperer? Nope; this is the way Howe died. He was standing by his claim and Mort and I rode up, and dismounted. Mort asked him for the makings and while Mort was a rolling a cigarette, I come behind and stabbed Howe in the back. He dropped, but being a big man he died hard. While he was lying there he told us that he had a brother who'd kill us both—a brother we couldn't get away from. Mort laughed at him, pulled out his gun, and shot him three times through the breast. And that's how he died! But me—I used the knife first—and by the knife—God knows, but I'm afraid—by the knife the Whisperer 'll kill me—cold steel—a sharp edge—”
And then; according to Mother Martha, she heard the most horrible sound of her life, something between a moan and a whisper, like the sound of a wind, far off and yet near. She could not tell where the sound came from—the open door, the window, or the ceiling above them.
It took the shape of a voice—a voiceless voice, which said: “Jack Tucker, you come next!”
Tucker jumped up with a scream and fired two shots through the open door and another through the window. Then he turned and damned Mother Martha, saying this wouldn't have happened if he'd stayed in his room. So he ran, cursing and shuddering, to his room.
Mother Martha had Ugly Joe call in four cow-punchers from the bunk-house and they searched all the vicinity of the house and particularly the sand outside the dining-room window, but not a trace of a man's foot was revealed by their lanterns It was decided, then, to place a guard over the house throughout the night; the next day they would bring out a posse from Eagles. Four men were posted, one at each corner of the house, and at a distance of about fifty feet, so as to command a full sweep of the surrounding ground. It was a dark night, and for this reason each man had a small fire of mesquite wood. The purpose was not to entrap the Whisperer, but simply to warn him away.
Afterward each of the guards swore that he had remained awake and on the alert, not wishing to fall asleep and have a knife slipped between his ribs by the Whisperer before he awoke. Each of the four was equally vehement in the defense of his individual vigilance. But it was known that all four had worked hard@that day, and there were many possibilities that they drowsed beside the fires.
What actually happened, at any rate, was that shortly after midnight the household of Joe Gregory wakened with a scream tingling in their ears. With one accord those inside the house and the guarding cowboys outside, rushed for the room of Jack Tucker. Ugly Joe himself called out a challenge and then was the first to enter, a lantern in one hand and a revolver in the other.
Behind him came his wife, Patricia, and then Goggles, his lean, trembling limbs wrapped in a dressing-gown of linen, stamped with a pattern of gay Japanese flowers. They found Jack Tucker lying face downward in a rapidly widening pool of blood. As they turned him on his back they found that he had been stabbed three times in the breast, each wound enough to cause death. His own jack-knife was still gripped in his hand, showing that he had died fighting, and not, at least, surprised from behind.
There was still a lingering life in him. When he opened his eyes the first thing that they encountered was the horrified face of Patricia leaning close above him.
His lips writhed, parted, and he said: “You—come next—he—told me.”
“Told you that she—that the girl—comes next?” cried Goggles, in horror, and he leaned close to the dying man.
Tucker screamed, struck at the face above him, and died.
CHAPTER XI.
THE FOLLY OF WOMEN.
PATRICIA, heart-sick and weak, did not wait to help care for the body of the dead man, but went back to her room. Ugly Joe stopped at her door a moment later to say that he had placed eight men on guard instead of four and that there would be no more trouble that night, at least. The next day he would take her to Eagles.
Nevertheless, she arranged the lamp on the little table at the head of her bed, so that by striking a match she could have a light in a second. The wick of the lamp was turned high, and she made sure that the supply of oil was high. After that she lay in the dark, certain that she would stay awake until the dawn. But the very violence of the succession of grim pictures which passed across her mind wearied her. Her last consciousness was that of shifting the revolver under her pillow so that it would be easier to grasp.
When she woke again it was with the suffocating consciousness that there was another living, breathing presence in the room. It struck upon her as vividly as a flood of light. She knew that from somewhere in the dark eyes were upon her. She was as conscious of it as a man may be of the sound of his beating heart, though that may be audible to no ear but his own.
At length she made it out—not a shape or any suggestion of a form—it was merely a certain lightening of the utter black near the window and toward the corner of the room. It did not move, but she knew.
And then Patricia was glad, very glad, for there was no fear in her. She was perfectly calm, her hand perfectly steady as she drew out the revolver steadily, softly, from beneath the pillow. She had never been so happy in her life, for she knew that she was meeting a test from which the strongest of brave men might have shrunk. She was about to meet the Whisperer face to face.
It must be understood, in order to follow what Patricia did next, that the little table rose almost a foot above the level of the bed. When the lamp on it was lighted, therefore, a thick shadow fell directly on the bed, though the rest of the room and particularly the ceiling, was well lighted. First she flattened herself on the bed—next she trained the revolver on the gray shadow of the corner. Finally she took a match, scratched it, lighted the lamp—and then gripped the revolver hard, her finger on the trigger. All that could have been seen of her, indeed, would have been the first flash of the light on her hand and wrist as she lighted the lamp. Instantly afterward she was lost in the black shadow which swam across the bed, in waves, because the unsheltered flame from the lamp-wick tossed up and down.
But what Patricia saw in the corner of the room, leaping suddenly out of the dark, was the figure of a man in gray clothes, wearing a tall, gray sombrero, with a long white mask across his face, and two dark holes where the eyes must be. She saw his hands; there was no weapon in them.
“Stand perfectly still,” said Patricia, “I have you covered with a revolver. I shoot well, and at the first move of your hands I'll press the trigger.”
Then came the sound which she had heard Mother Martha describe earlier in the evening, but far more terrible than any description—a voiceless voice—something between a whisper and a moan, ghastly, unnerving. At the sound her arm and hand shook—her very brain reeled.
“I have not come to harm you,” said the Whisperer, “I have come only to make you give St. Gore his freedom. You have only to speak a word, and I shall be gone again. Say it!”
“You will only leave in the power of the law,” said Patricia. “I have you now—I have only to press the trigger—”
“But you cannot,” said the Whisperer. “You were cool a moment ago, but now your voice shakes—you dare not raise it so that others in the house might hear—your hand is growing cold—”
“You lie!” said Patricia. “Help! Cousin Joe!”
But even as he had warned her, her voice was only a dry whisper. The hysteria of blind fear seized her at the throat. She knew that in another second he would be complete master—she could feel her strength slipping from her.
He raised an arm and advanced a pace.
“I am waiting,” he said. “Be brave—I have not come to harm you—you have only to speak and I disappear—”
Then she fired.
It seemed as if the Whisperer sat down, shoved abruptly toward a chair; then he collapsed along the floor.
She leaped from the bed; in the distance she heard many voices—shouts, running steps. Over the prostrate figure she leaned, tore away the mask, and looked into the calm, steady eyes of Goggles!
She could not conceive it at first; it was like the miracle which surpasses belief. The revolver clicked on the floor, fallen from her nerveless hand. “You—you—you!” she could only stammer.
“I,” said Goggles faintly, and smiled up at her. “The game's up, but it was jolly while it lasted!”
There came a banging at her door—the shout of Ugly Joe. She leaned, picked up the revolver, and ran to the door, which she set a little ajar and peeked out.
“I can't let you in—I'm undressed; I was handling the revolver—and it went off—I'm not the least hurt.”
“Thank God!” groaned Ugly Joe, and voices behind him echoed heavily: “Thank God!”
She closed the door, barred it again, and ran to Goggles. He had struggled to a half sitting posture, and as she leaned over him his eyes widened with a sort of fascinated horror.
“You don't understand,” said he. “Open the door; call them in. I am the Whisperer!”
“Hush!” she said. “Little fool, be still!”
She leaned and picked him up. He was hardly heavier than she, and she bore his weight without great difficulty. With her strong young arms she felt the frailty of the outlaw whom the whole mountain-desert had feared. For an instant his head lay helpless against her bare shoulder; the nervous right hand which had dealt death once that night hung limply down. She felt the quick, shuddering intake of his breath against her throat.
Only an instant, and then she laid him on her bed. There she tore open his shirt.
“The left side,” said he. “You meant well, but the bullet must have glanced—on the ribs. A fraction of an inch closer in, and—”
He set his teeth with a light click and closed his eyes against the pain.
Then she found the wound. It was bleeding profusely, but she saw at a glance that it was not serious. It had glanced, apparently, from a rib, as he suggested, and had furrowed through the flesh along his side. A grisly painful wound, but not mortal. She ran to her suit-case, ripped a linen shirt into narrow strips, ran back, and made the pack and bandage.
She had studied a little of first-aid, though she had never before had occasion to make use of it.
He helped her as well as he could, rolling from side to side, though the pain sent the sweat out upon his forehead. When she was finished he leaned heavily back on the pillows.
His face was almost as white as the bedding, and the hand which lay across his breast was marvelously fragile, almost transparent.
“In a moment,” he said, “I'll be able to go.”
He opened his eyes.
“But you,” he said, “don't understand—why—”
“I don't understand either,” she said, “I don't want to understand—I don't want to think—except to get you safe and well again.”
“And you won't turn me in—the Whisperer? Think of the name of it? Think of the fame of it! Think of what it would mean to you!”
“Do you really expect me to?” she asked.
“I don't know. I thought I knew—a good many things—about you—and other women—but I guess I've been a fool—a great fool. Most men are—I guess—about women.”
“And I, too,” she answered. “I've been a great fool, but I think I've found myself in time.”
And for the conclusion of the story we may as well take the version of Ugly Joe Gregory, as he told it many times in the saloons of Eagles, for every stranger had to hear the story of the last appearance of the Whisperer, and Ugly Joe had the only authentic version.
In the conclusion he always said:
“No, I never seen him, but my wife heard his whisper.
“And while I'm spreading on the talk I might's well tell you something else damn near as queer as the things the Whisperer done them three days.
“There was a dude out here—a no-account damned dude we called Goggles from his funny glasses. Most of the boys around here remember him.
“He was a sort of go-between for the Whisperer. And he was the one, maybe, that brought all the hell to poor Tucker and the rest of 'em. He was at the house, you know.
“Well, the dude must of been pretty badly shook up by the bad way Tucker died, because the next day he come down with a fever and stayed in bed off and on about three weeks.
“The funny part was that this girl—this Pat I been telling you about—got a pile interested in the dude when he was sick. You couldn't pry her away from his bed. Women are queer that way, but she was the queerest of the lot.
“Day and night she stuck by him like she was his sister. Wouldn't even let Mother Martha, that knew a pile more about nursing than she ever did, help her once in a while.
“Martha, she pretended to be pretty wise about something, but it was all Indian to me. But in the end, well, sir, the dude went back to Eagles, and Pat went with him. And right over there in Widow Morgan's boarding-house, in the front parlor down-stairs, they was married.
“Can you beat that? You can't. I'll bet you can't!
“I s'pose she got so used to taking care of the poor dude that she couldn't get along without him. That's the way Martha explained it. Martha was that way herself at one time.
“She took care of a calf that got cut bad in barb wire once, and afterward she wouldn't never let me sell that calf or market him, but just kept him hangin' around useless till he got to be a steer and died of old age. Yep, women are sure fools about some things.
“There was one funnier thing, too, that come out after Pat married that gent. It seemed that Vincent St. Gore was only part of his name.
“The whole of his name was Vincent St. Gore Howe.”
The end.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1944, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 79 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse