I could do,
and I admitted a little experience in handling real estate, he brought
his 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 what I thought of it. I discovered that
the poor fellow had shot himself, and in the end we had to put him
in the insane asylum to save him from the penitentiary--but that was
where my trouble began.

"It ended in my having to organize the special service on the whole
road to look after a thousand and one things that nobody else
had--well, let us say time or inclination to look after: fraud and
theft and violence and all that sort of disagreeable thing. Then one
day the cat crawled out of the bag. What do you think? That man who is
now president of this road had somewhere seen a highly colored story
about me in a magazine, a ten-cent magazine, you know. He had spotted
me the first time I walked into his office, and told me a long time
afterward it was just like seeing a man walk out of a book, and that
he had hard work to keep from falling on my neck. He knew what he
wanted me for; it was just this thing. I left Chicago to get away from
it, and this is the result. It is not all that kind of thing, oh, no!
When they want to cross a reservation I h