Page:Frank Spearman--Whispering Smith.djvu/235

 they call you Whispering Smith? You don’t whisper.”

He laughed with abundance of good-humor. “That is a ridiculous accident, and it all came about when I lived in Chicago. Do you know anything about the infernal climate there? Well, in Chicago I used to lose my voice whenever I caught a cold—sometimes for weeks together. So they began calling me Whispering Smith, and I’ve never been able to shake the name. Odd, isn’t it? But I came out to go into the real-estate business. I was looking for some gold-bearing farm lands where I could raise quartz, don’t you know, and such things—yes. I don’t mind telling you this, though I wouldn’t tell it to everybody”

“Certainly not,” assented Dicksie, drawing her skirt around to sit in closer confidence.

“I wanted to get rich quick,” murmured Whispering Smith, confidentially.

“Almost criminal, wasn’t it?”

“I wanted to have evening clothes.”

“Yes.”

“And for once in my life two pairs of suspenders—a modest ambition, but a gnawing one. Would you believe it? Before I left Bucks’s office he had hired me for a railroad man. When he asked me what I could do, and I admitted a little experience in handling real estate, he brought his 211