of
fare started, modestly but firmly, to leave the dining-room. At
Whispering Smith's table there were no second calls for coffee. To
stimulate the eating he turned the conversation into channels as
reassuring as possible. Unfortunately for his endeavor, the man at the
far end of the table reached for a toothpick. It seemed a pleasant way
out of the difficulty, and when the run on toothpicks had once begun,
all Whispering Smith's cordiality could not check it. Every man
appeared to want a toothpick, and one after another of Whispering
Smith's company deserted him. He was finally left alone with a
physician known as "Doc," a forger and a bigamist from Denver. Smith
tried to engage Doc in medical topics. The doctor was not alone
frightened but tipsy, and when Smith went so far as to ask him, as a
medical man, whether in his opinion the high water in the mountains
had any direct connection with the prevalence of falling of the spine
among old "residenters" in Williams Cache, the doctor felt of his head
as if his brain were turning turtle.

When Whispering Smith raised his knife ostentatiously to bring out a
feature of his theory, the doctor raised his knife higher to admit the
force of it; and when Whispering Smith leaned his head forward
impressively to drive home a point in his assertion, the doctor
stretched his neck till his face grew apoplectic. Releasing him at
length from the strain, Whispering Smith begged of the staring
maid-servant the recipe for the biscuit. When she came back with it he
sat all alone, pouring catsup over his griddle-cakes in an abstracted
manner, and it so flurried her that she had to go out again to ask
whether the gasolene went into the dough or under it.

He played out the play to the end, but when he rode away in the dusk
his face was careworn. John Rebstock had told him why Sinclair dodged:
there were others whom Sinclair wanted to meet first; and Whispering
Smith was again heading on a long, hard ride, and after a man on a
better horse, back to the Crawling Stone and Medicine Bend. "There's
others he wants to see first or you'd have no trouble in talking
business to-day. You nor no other man will ever get him alive." But
Whispering Smith knew that.

"See that he doesn't get you alive, Rebstock," was his parting retort.
"If he finds out Kennedy has got the Tower W money, the first thing he
does will be to put the Doxology all over you."

CHAPTER XL

A SYMPATHETIC EAR

When