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Updated: June 16, 2025
Dicksie's face, still averted, had grown white. "I saw him move. Can't you do something for him?" She reined up at a little distance. McCloud bent over the man a moment and spoke to him. When he rose he called to the men on the track. "You are right," he said, rejoining Dicksie; "he is very much alive. His name is Wickwire; he is a cowboy." "A cowboy!" "A tramp cowboy."
Dicksie walked around on the porch to the kitchen. A dust-covered man sitting on a limp horse threw back the brim of his hat as he touched it, lifted himself stiffly out of the saddle, and dropped to the ground. He laughed at Dicksie's startled expression. "Don't you know me?" he asked, putting out his hand. It was Whispering Smith. He was a fearful sight.
"If his death means this to you, think of what it means to me!" A flood of sympathy bore them together. The moment was hardly one for interruption, but the despatcher's door opened and Rooney Lee halted, thunderstruck, on the threshold. Dicksie's hand disappeared in her handkerchief. McCloud had been in wrecks before, and gathered himself together unmoved. "What is it, Rooney?"
When she came back from Kentucky, her grandmother dead and her schooldays finished, all the land she could see in the valley was hers, and all the living creatures in the fields. It seemed perfectly natural, because since childhood even the distant mountains and their snows had been Dicksie's. Sinclair's discharge was a matter of comment for the whole country, from the ranch-houses to the ranges.
"Damn it, I like your grit, girl! Well, good-night, anyway." She closed the door. She had even strength enough to bolt it before his footsteps died away. She put out the light and felt her way blindly back to the work-room. She staggered through it, clutching at the curtains, and fell in the darkness into Dicksie's arms. "Marion dear, don't speak," Dicksie whispered. "I heard everything.
When McCloud dismounted to open Dicksie's gate, and stood in the twilight with his hat in his hand and his bridle over his arm, he was telling a story about Marion Sinclair, and Dicksie in the saddle, tapping her knee with her bridle-rein, was looking down and past him as if the light upon his face were too bright.
McCloud, is it you? I did not hear you come in." Dicksie's face, which had lighted, became a spectacle of confusion after she heard the name. McCloud, conscious of the awkwardness of his position and the disorder of his garb, said the worst thing at once: "I fear I am inadvertently overhearing your conversation."
Her confusion was delightful. He rose, lifted her hand in his own, and, bending, kissed it. They talked till late, and when Dicksie walked out on the porch McCloud followed to smoke. Whispering Smith still sat at the table talking to Marion, and the two heard the sound of the low voices outside. At intervals Dicksie's laugh came in through the open door.
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