Page:Frank Spearman--Whispering Smith.djvu/236

 fist down on the table and swore I should be his right-of-way man.”

“How about the mining?”

Whispering Smith waved his hand in something of the proud manner in which Bucks could wave his presidential hand. “My business, Bucks said, need not interfere with that, not in the least; he said that I could do all the mining I wanted to, and I have done all the mining I wanted to. But here is the singular thing that happened: I opened up my office and had nothing to do; they didn’t seem to want any right of way just then. I kept getting my check every month, and wasn’t doing a hand’s turn but riding over the country and shooting jack-rabbits. But, Lord, I love this country! Did you know I used to be a cowboy in the mountains years ago? Indeed I did. I know it almost as well as you do. I mined more or less in the meantime. Occasionally I would go to Bucks––you say you don’t know him?––too bad!––and tell him candidly I wasn’t doing a thing to earn my salary. At such times he would only ask me how I liked the job,” and Whispering Smith’s heavy eyebrows rose in mild surprise at the recollection. “One day when I was talking with him he handed me a telegram from the desert saying that a night operator at a lonely station had been shot and a switch misplaced and a train nearly wrecked. He asked me 212