if he had to come up here and
meet him single-handed, but, he will never have to do it. He put you
here, George, to round that man up. This is the price for your
advancement, and you must pay it."

"It is all right for me to pay it, but I don't want you to pay it.
Will you have a care for yourself, Gordon?"

"Will you?"

"Yes."

"You need never ask me to be careful," Smith went on. "That is my
business. I asked you to watch your window-shades at night, and when I
came in just now I found one up. It is you who are likely to forget,
and in this kind of a game a man never forgets but once. I'll lie down
on the Lincoln lounge, George."

"Get into the bed."

"No; I like the lounge, and I'm off early."

In the private room of the superintendent, provided as a sleeping
apartment in the old headquarters building many years before hotel
facilities reached Medicine Bend, stood the only curio the Wickiup
possessed--the Lincoln lounge. When the car that carried the remains
of Abraham Lincoln from Washington to Springfield was dismantled, the
Wickiup fell heir to one piece of its elaborate furnishings, the
lounge, and the lounge still remains as an early-day relic. Whispering
Smith walked into the bedroom and disposed himself in an incredibly
short time. "I've borrowed one of your pillows, George," he called out
presently.

"Take both."

"One's enough. I hope," he went on, rolling himself like a hen into
the double blanket, "the horse Kennedy has left me will be all right;
he got three from Bill Dancing. Bill Dancing," he snorted, driving his
nose into the pillow as if in final memorandum for the night, "he will
get himself killed if he fools around Sinclair too much now."

McCloud, under a light shaded above his desk, opened a roll of
blue-prints. He was going to follow a construction gang up the
Crawling Stone in the morning and wanted to look over the surveys.
Whispering Smith, breathing regularly, lay not far away. It was late
when McCloud put away his maps, entered the inner room, and looked at
his friend.

He lay like a boy asleep. On the chair beside his head he had placed
his old-fashioned hunting-case watch, as big as an alarm-clock, the
kind a railroad man would wind up with a spike-maul. Beside the watch
he had laid his huge revolver in its worn leather scabbard. Breathing
peacefully, he lay quite at his companion's mercy, and McCloud,
looking down on this man who never made a mistake, never forgot a
dan