Whispering SmithSpearman, Frank H. (Frank Hamilton)
General
Whispering Smith
Spearman, Frank H. (Frank Hamilton)
Detectives -- West (U.S.) -- Fiction; Railroad police -- West (U.S.) -- Fiction; Railroad stories; Western stories
The surgeon pointed his finger at the murderer. "No, I won't get out
of this door. Shoot, you coward! Shoot an unarmed man. You will not
live to get a hundred feet away. This place is watched for you; you
could not have got within a hundred yards of it to-night except for
this snow." Barnhardt pointed through the storm. "Sinclair, you will
hang in the court-house square, and I will take the last beat of your
pulse with these fingers, and when I pronounce you dead they will cut
you down. You want to see your wife. You want to kill her. Don't lie;
you want to kill her. You were heard to say as much to-night at the
Dunning ranch. You were watched and tracked, and you are expected and
looked for here. Your best friends have gone back on you. Ay, curse
again and over again, but that will not put Ed Banks on his feet."
Sinclair stamped with frenzied oaths. "You're too hard on me," he
cried, clenching his hands. "I say you're too hard. You've heard one
side of it. Is that the way you put judgment on a man that's got no
friends left because they start a new lie on him every day? Who is it
that's watching me? Let them stand out like men in the open. If they
want me, let them come like men and take me!"
"Sinclair, this storm gives you a chance to get away; take it. Bad as
you are, there are men in Medicine Bend who knew you when you were a
man. Don't stay here for some of them to sit on the jury that hangs
you. If you can get away, get away. If I were your friend--and God
knows whom you can call friend in Medicine Bend to-night--I couldn't
say more. Get away before it is too late."
He was never again seen alive in Medicine Bend. They tracked him next
day over every foot of ground he had covered. They found where he had
left his spent horse and where afterward he had got the fresh one.
They learned how he had eluded all the picketing planned for precisely
such a contingency, got into the Wickiup, got upstairs and burst open
the very door of McCloud's room. But Dicksie had on her side that
night One greater than her invincible will or her faithful horse.
McCloud was two hundred miles away.
Barnhardt lost no time in telephoning the Wickiup that Sinclair was in
town, but within an hour, while the two women were still under the
surgeon's protection, a knock at the cottage door gave them a second
fright. Barnhardt answered the summons. He opened the door and, as the
man outside paused to shake the snow off his hat, the surgeon caught
him by the shoulder and dragged into the house Whispering Smith.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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