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Take no tent, but if you will, have an Indian build you a wickiup, willows planted in a circle, drawn over to an arch, and bound cunningly with withes, all the leaves on, and chinks to count the stars through. But there was never any but Winnenap' who could tell and make it worth telling about Shoshone Land. And Winnenap' will not any more. He died, as do most medicine-men of the Paiutes.
He shook and questioned, but from the dazed operator he could get only one word, "O'Neill," and stepping to the hall door Glover called out "O'Neill!" It has been said that Glover's voice would carry in a mountain storm from side to side of the Medicine Bend yard. That night the very last rafter in the Wickiup gables rang with his cry.
Having watered his horse and staked him out to feed, he sat down upon a log near the wickiup and ate his cold supper quietly.
At five o'clock that morning despatchers and night men under the Wickiup gables, sitting moodily around the big stove, sprang to their feet together. From up the distant gorge, dying far on the gale, came the long chime blast of an engine whistle; it was the lost Special. They crowded to the windows to dispute and listen.
Indeed, he made hardly an effort to support her look and she swept past him into the car. The Brock train lay all next day in the Medicine Bend yard. A number of the party, with horses and guides, rode to the Medicine Springs west of the town. Glover, buried in drawings and blueprints, was in his office at the Wickiup all day with Manager Bucks and President Brock.
There were three other blind women in the campoodie, withered fruit on a bough, but they had memory and speech. By noon of the sun there were never any left in the campoodie but these or some mother of weanlings, and they sat to keep the ashes warm upon the hearth. If it were cold, they burrowed in the blankets of the hut; if it were warm, they followed the shadow of the wickiup around.
Glover, leaving the Wickiup with Morris Blood, ran into Gertrude Brock coming out of an Indian curio-shop with Doctor Lanning. She began at once to talk to Glover. "Marie was regretting, yesterday, that you had not yet found your way to Glen Tarn." The sun beat intensely on her black hat and her suit of gray.
"Your supper is getting cold," she called to him. He took a seat beside her on a pile of boughs where the smoke was least troublesome; he had chosen a spot that was sheltered by a lichen-covered ledge, and this low wall behind, with the wickiup joining it, formed an enclosure that lent them a certain air of privacy. They ate ravenously, and drank deep cupfuls of the unflavored tea.
Then the three worked with amazing speed, and by the time the full dark had come the wickiup was done, the skins that they had brought with them being stretched tightly over the poles. Then, munching their cold food, they crawled in and coiled themselves about the walls, wrapped deep in their blankets.
Five minutes later a messenger came to the car from the Wickiup with word that Kennedy was looking for Whispering Smith. Bucks, McCloud, and Smith left the car together and walked up to McCloud's office. Kennedy, sitting on the edge of the table, was tapping his leg nervously with a ruler. "Bad news, Gordon." "Not from Ed Banks?" "Sinclair got him this morning." Whispering Smith sat down. "Go on."
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