h
stretched himself on the floor. When all was still again, Dannie's
hand crept slowly from the breast of his companion up to his chin, and
the little hand, feeling softly every feature, stole over the strange
face.

"What is it, Dannie?"

"Are you Whispering Smith?"

"Yes, Dannie. Shut your eyes."

At three o'clock, when Kennedy lighted a candle and looked in, Smith
was sitting with his back against the wall. The boy lay on his arm.
Both were fast asleep. On the bed the dead man lay with a handkerchief
over his face.

CHAPTER XXIX

WILLIAMS CACHE

Ed Banks had been recalled before daybreak from the middle pass. Two
of the men wanted were now known to have crossed the creek, which
meant they must work out of the country through Williams Cache.

"If you will take your best two men, Ed," said Whispering Smith,
sitting down with Banks at breakfast, "and strike straight for
Canadian Pass to help Gene and Bob Johnson, I'll undertake to ride in
and talk to Rebstock while Kennedy and Bob Scott watch Deep Creek. The
boy gives a good description, and the two men that did the job here
are Du Sang and Flat Nose. Did I tell you how we picked up the trail
yesterday? Magpies. They shot a scrub horse that gave out on them and
skinned the brand. It hastened the banquet, but we got there before
the birds were all seated. Great luck, wasn't it? And it gave us a
beautiful trail. One of the party crossed the Goose River at American
Fork, and Brill Young and Reed followed him. Four came through the
Mission Mountains; that is a cinch and they are in the Cache--and if
they get out it is our fault personally, Ed, and not the Lord's."

Williams Cache lies in the form of a great horn, with a narrow
entrance at the lower end known as the Door, and a rock fissure at the
upper end leading into Canadian Pass; but this fissure is so narrow
that a man with a rifle could withstand a regiment. For a hundred
miles east and west rise the granite walls of the Mission range,
broken nowhere save by the formation known as the Cache. Even this
does not penetrate the range; it is a pocket, and runs not over
half-way into it and out again. But no man really knows the Cache; the
most that may be said is that the main valley is known, and it is
known as the roughest mountain fissure between the Spanish Sinks and
the Mantrap country. Williams Cache lies between walls two thousand
feet high, and within it is a small labyrinth of canyons. A gener