they are not yet men, and some tincture of woman's nature
still clings to a boy. Girls are born to the deftness that is to
become all theirs in the touch of a woman's hand; but men, if they
walk alone, pay the penalty of loneliness.

Whispering Smith, being logical, made no effort to decorate his
domestic poverty. All his belongings were of a simple sort and his
room was as bare as a Jesuit's. Moreover, his affairs, being at times
highly particular, did not admit of the presence of a janitor in his
quarters, and he was of necessity his own janitor. His iron bed was
spread with a pair of Pullman blankets, his toilet arrangements
included nothing more elaborate than a shaving outfit, and the mirror
above his washstand was only large enough to make a hurried shave,
with much neck-stretching, possible. The table was littered with
letters, but it filled up one corner of the room, and a rocking-chair
and a trunk filled up another. The floor was spread with a Navajo
blanket, and near the head of the bed stood an old-fashioned wardrobe.
This served not to ward Whispering Smith's robes, which hung for the
most part on his back, but to accommodate his rifles, of which it
contained an array that only a practised man could understand. The
wardrobe was more, however, than an armory. Beside the guns that stood
racked in precision along the inner wall, McCloud had once, to his
surprise, seen a violin. It appeared out of keeping in such an
atmosphere and rather the antithesis of force and violence than a
complement for it. And again, though the rifles were disquietingly
bright and effective-looking, the violin was old and shabby, hanging
obscurely in its corner, as if, whatever it might have in common with
its master, it had nothing in common with its surroundings.

The door of the room in the course of many years had been mutilated
with keyholes and reenforced with locks until it appeared difficult
to choose an opening that would really afford entrance; but two men
besides Whispering Smith carried keys to the room--Kennedy and George
McCloud. They had right of way into it at all hours, and knew how to
get in.

McCloud had left the bridge camp on the river for Medicine Bend on the
Saturday that Marion Sinclair--whose husband had finally told her he
would give her one more chance to think it over--returned with Dicksie
safely from their trip to the Frenchman ranch.

Whispering Smith, who had been with Bucks and Morris Blood, got ba