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The words were spoken deliberately. De Spain was silent for a moment. “Not even to speak to me?” he asked.
“You must know the position I am in,” she answered. “And what a position you place me in if I am seen to speak to you. This is my home. You are the enemy of my people.”
“Not because I want to be.”
“And you can’t expect them not to resent any acquaintance on my part with you.”
He paused before continuing. “Do you count Gale Morgan as one of your people?” he asked evenly.
“I suppose I must.”
“Don’t you think you ought to count all of your friends, your well-wishers, those who would defend you with their lives, among your people?” She made no answer. “Aren’t they the kind of people,” he persisted, “you need when you are in trouble?”
“You needn’t remind me I should be grateful to you–––”
“Nan!” he exclaimed.
“For I am,” she continued, unmoved. “But–––”
“It’s a shame to accuse me in that way.”
“You were thinking when you spoke of what happened with Gale on Music Mountain.”
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“I wish to God you and I were on Music Mountain again! I never lived or did anything worth living for, till you came to me that day on Music Mountain. It’s true I was thinking of what happened when I spoke––but not to remind you you owed anything to me. You don’t; get that out of your head.”
“I do, though.”
“I spoke in the way I did because I wanted to remind you of what might happen some time when I’m not near.”
“I shan’t be caught off my guard again. I know how to defend myself from a drunken man.”
He could not restrain all the bitterness he felt. “That man,” he said deliberately, “is more dangerous sober than drunk.”
“When I can’t defend myself, my uncle will defend me.”
“Ask him to let me help.”
“He doesn’t need any help. And he would never ask you, if he did. I can’t live at home and know you; that is why I ask you not to come again.”
He was silent. “Don’t you think, all things considered,” she hesitated, as if not knowing how easiest to put it, “you ought to be willing to shake hands and say good-by?”
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“Why, if you wish it,” he answered, taken aback. And he added more quietly, “yes, if you say so.”
“I mean for good.”
“I––” he returned, pausing, “don’t.”
“You are not willing to be fair.”
“I want to be fair––I don’t want to promise more than human nature will stand for––and then break my word.”
“I am not asking a whole lot.”
“Not a whole lot to you, I know. But do you really mean that you don’t want me ever to speak to you again?”
“If you must put it that way––yes.”
“Well,” he took a long breath, “there is one way to make sure of that. I’ll tell you honestly I don’t want to stand in the way of such a wish, if it’s really yours. As you have said, it isn’t fair, perhaps, for me to go against it. Got your pistol with you, Nan?”
“No.”
“That is the way you take care of yourself, is it?”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself not to be. And you don’t even know whom you’ll meet before you can lock the front door again. You promised me never to go out without it.234Promise me that once more, will you?” She did as he asked her. “Now, give me your hand, please,” he went on. “Take hold of this.”
“What is it?”
“The butt of my revolver. Don’t be afraid.” She heard the slight click of the hammer with a thrill of strange apprehension. “What are you doing?” she demanded hurriedly.
“Put your finger on the trigger––so. It is cocked. Now pull.”
She caught her breath. “What do you mean?”
He was holding the gun in his two hands, his fingers overlapping hers, the muzzle at the breast of his jacket. “Pull,” he repeated, “that’s all you have to do; I’m steadying it.”
She snatched back her hand. “What do you mean?” she cried. “For me to kill you? Shame!”
“You are too excited––all I asked you was to take the trouble to crook your finger––and I’ll never speak to you again––you’ll have your wish forever.”
“Shame!”
“Why shame?” he retorted. “I mean what I say. If you meant what you said, why don’t you put it out of my power ever to speak to you? Do you want me to pull the trigger?”
“I told you once I’m not an assassin––how dare235you ask me to do such a thing?” she cried furiously.
“Call your uncle,” he suggested coolly. “You may hold this meantime so you’ll know he’s in no danger. Take my gun and call your uncle–––”
“Shame on you!”
“Call Gale––call any man in the Gap––they’ll jump at the chance.”
“You are a cold-blooded, brutal wretch––I’m sorry I ever helped you––I’m sorry I ever let you help me––I’m sorry I ever saw you!”
She sprang away before he could interpose a word. He stood stunned by the suddenness of her outburst, trying to listen and to breathe at the same time. He heard the front door close, and stood waiting. But no further sound from the house greeted his ears.
“And I thought,” he muttered to himself, “that might calm her down a little. I’m certainly in wrong, now.”
236CHAPTER XVIIIHER BAD PENNY
Nan reached her room in a fever of excitement, angry at de Spain, bitterly angry at Gale, angry with the mountains, the world, and resentfully fighting the pillow on which she cried herself to sleep.
In the morning every nerve was on edge. When her Uncle Duke, with his chopping utterance, said something short to her at their very early breakfast he was surprised by an answer equally short. Her uncle retorted sharply. A second curt answer greeted his rebuff, and while he stared at her, Nan left the table and the room.
Duke, taking two of the men, started that morning for Sleepy Cat with a bunch of cattle. He rode a fractious horse, as he always did, and this time the horse, infuriated as his horses frequently were by his brutal treatment, bolted in a moment unguarded by his master, and flung Duke on his back in a strip of lava rocks.
The old man––in the mountains a man is called old after he passes forty––was heavy, and the fall a serious one. He picked himself up while the237men were recovering his horse, knocked the horse over with a piece of jagged rock when the frightened beast was brought back, climbed into the saddle again, and rode all the way into town.
But when his business was done, Duke, too, was done. He could neither sit a horse, nor sit in a wagon. Doctor Torpy, after an examination, told him he was booked for the hospital. A stream of profane protest made no difference with his adviser, and, after many threats and hard words, to the hospital the hard-shelled mountaineer was taken. Sleepy Cat was stirred at the news, and that the man who had defied everybody in the mountains for twenty years should have been laid low and sent to the hospital by a mere bronco was the topic of many comments.
The men that had driven the cattle with Duke, having been paid off, were now past getting home, and there were no telephones in the Gap. De Spain, who was at Calabasas, knew Nan would not be alarmed should her uncle not return that night. But early in the morning a messenger from McAlpin rode to her with a note, telling her of the accident.
Whatever his vices, Duke had been a good protector to his dead brother’s child. He had sent her to good schools and tried to revive in her, despite her untoward surroundings, the better traditions238of the family as it had once flourished in Kentucky. Nan took the saddle for Sleepy Cat in haste and alarm. When she reached her uncle’s bedside she understood how seriously he had been hurt, and the doctor’s warnings were not needed to convince her he must have care.
Duke refused to let her leave him, in any case, and Nan relieved the nurse, and what was of equal moment, made herself custodian of the cash in hand before Duke’s town companions could get hold of it. Occasional trips to the Gap were necessary as the weeks passed and her uncle could not be moved. These Nan had feared as threatening an encounter either by accident, or on his part designed, with de Spain. But the impending encounter never took place. De Spain, attending closely to his own business, managed to keep accurate track of her whereabouts without getting in her way. She had come to Sleepy Cat dreading to meet him and fearing his influence over her, but this apprehension, with the passing of a curiously brief period, dissolved into a confidence in her ability to withstand further interference, on any one’s part, with her feelings.
Gale Morgan rode into town frequently, and Nan at first painfully apprehended hearing some time of a deadly duel between her truculent Gap admirer and her persistent town courtier––who239was more considerate and better-mannered, but no less dogged and, in fact, a good deal more difficult to handle.
As to the boisterous mountain-man, his resolute little cousin made no secret of her detestation of him. She denied and defied him as openly as a girl could and heard his threats with continued indifference. She was quite alone, too, in her fear of any fatal meeting between the two men who seemed determined to pursue her.
The truth was that after Calabasas, de Spain, from Thief River to Sleepy Cat, was a marked man. None sought to cross his path or his purposes. Every one agreed he would yet be killed, but not the hardiest of the men left to attack him cared to undertake the job themselves. The streets of the towns and the trails of the mountains were free as the wind to de Spain. And neither the town haunts of Calabasas men nor those of their Morgan Gap sympathizers had any champion disposed to follow too closely the alert Medicine Bend railroader.
In and about the hospital, and in the town itself, Nan found the chief obstacle to her peace of mind in the talk she could not always avoid hearing about de Spain. Convalescents in the corridors, practically all of them men, never gathered in sunny corners or at the tables in the dining-room240without de Spain’s name coming in some way into the talk, to be followed with varying circumstantial accounts of what really had happened that day at Calabasas.
And with all the known escapades in which he had figured, exhausted as topics, by long-winded commentators, more or less hazy stories of his earlier experiences at Medicine Bend in the company of Whispering Smith were dragged into the talk. One convalescent stage-guard at the hospital told a story one night at supper about him that chilled Nan again with strange fears, for she knew it to be true. He had had it from McAlpin himself, so the guard said, that de Spain’s father had long ago been shot down from ambush by a cattleman and that Henry de Spain had sworn to find that man and kill him. And it was hinted pretty strongly that de Spain had information when he consented to come to Sleepy Cat that the assassin still lived, and lived somewhere around the head of the Sinks.
That night, Nan dreamed. She dreamed of a sinister mark on a face that she had never before seen––a face going into bronzed young manhood with quick brown eyes looking eagerly at her. And before her wondering look it faded, dreamlike, into a soft mist, and where it had been, a man lay, lifting himself on one arm from the ground––his241sleeve tattered, his collar torn, his eyes half-living, half-dead, his hair clotted, his lips stiffened and distended, his face drawn. And all of this dissolved into an image of de Spain on horseback, sudden, alert, threatening, looking through the mist at an enemy. Then Nan heard the sharp report of a rifle and saw him whirl half around––struck––in his saddle, and fall. But he fell into her arms, and she woke sobbing violently.
She was upset for the whole day, moody and apprehensive, with a premonition that she should soon see de Spain––and, perhaps, hurt again. The dream unnerved her every time she thought of him. That evening the doctor came late. When he walked in he asked her if she knew it was Frontier Day, and reminded her that just a year ago she had shot against Henry de Spain and beaten the most dangerous man and the deadliest shot on the mountain divide in her rifle match. How he had grown in the imagination of Sleepy Cat and Music Mountain, she said to herself––while the doctor talked to her uncle––since that day a year ago! Then he was no more than an unknown and discomfited marksman from Medicine Bend, beaten by a mountain girl: now the most talked-of man in the high country. And the suspicion would sometimes obtrude itself with pride into her mind, that she who never mentioned242his name when it was discussed before her, really knew and understood him better than any of those that talked so much––that she had at least one great secret with him alone.
When leaving, the doctor wished to send over from his office medicine for her uncle. Nan offered to go with him, but the doctor said it was pretty late and Main Street pretty noisy: he preferred to find a messenger.
Nan was sitting in the sick-room a little later––B-19 in the old wing of the hospital, facing the mountains––when there came a rap on the half-open door. She went forward to take the medicine from the messenger and saw, standing before her in the hall, de Spain.
She shrank back as if struck. She tried to speak. Her tongue refused its office. De Spain held a package out in his hand. “Doctor Torpy asked me to give you this.”
“Doctor Torpy? What is it?”
“I really don’t know––I suppose it is medicine.” She heard her uncle turn in his bed at the sound of voices. Thinking only that he must not at any cost see de Spain, Nan stepped quickly into the hall and faced the messenger. “I was over at the doctor’s office just now,” continued her visitor evenly, “he asked me to bring this down for your uncle.” She took the package with an243incoherent acknowledgment. Without letting her eyes meet his, she was conscious of how fresh and clean and strong he looked, dressed in a livelier manner than usual––a partly cowboy effect, with a broader Stetson and a gayer tie than he ordinarily affected. De Spain kept on speaking: “The telephone girl in the office down-stairs told me to come right up. How is your uncle?”
She regarded him wonderingly: “He has a good deal of pain,” she answered quietly.
“Too bad he should have been hurt in such a way. Are you pretty well, Nan?” She thanked him.
“Have you got over being mad at me?” he asked.
“No,” she averred resolutely.
“I’m glad you’re not,” he returned, “I’m not over being mad at myself. Haven’t seen you for a long time. Stay here a good deal, do you?”
“All the time.”
“I’ll bet you don’t know what day this is?”
Nan looked up the corridor, but she answered to the point: “You’d lose.”
“It’s our anniversary.” She darted a look of indignant disclaimer at him. But in doing so she met his eyes. “Have you seen the decorations in Main Street?” he asked indifferently. “Come out for a minute and look at them.”
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She shook her head: “I don’t care to,” she answered, looking restlessly, this time, down the corridor.
“Come to the door just a minute and see the way they’ve lighted the arches.” She knew just the expression of his eyes that went with that tone. She looked vexedly at him to confirm her suspicion. Sure enough there in the brown part and in the lids, it was, the most troublesome possible kind of an expression––hard to be resolute against. Her eyes fell away, but some damage had been done. He did not say another word. None seemed necessary. He just kept still and something––no one could have said just what––seemed to talk for him to poor defenseless Nan. She hesitated helplessly: “I can’t leave uncle,” she objected at last.
“Ask him to come along.”
Her eyes fluttered about the dimly lighted hall: de Spain gazed on her as steadily as a charmer. “I ought not to leave even for a minute,” she protested weakly.
“I’ll stay here at the door while you go.”
Irresolute, she let her eyes rest again for a fraction of a second on his eyes; when she drew a breath after that pause everything was over. “I’d better give him his medicine first,” she said, looking toward the sick-room door.
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His monosyllabic answer was calm: “Do.” Then as she laid her hand on the knob of the door to enter the room: “Can I help any?”
“Oh, no!” she cried indignantly.
He laughed silently: “I’ll stay here.”
Nan disappeared. Lounging against the window-sill opposite the door, he waited. After a long time the door was stealthily reopened. Nan tiptoed out. She closed it softly behind her: “I waited for him to go to sleep,” she explained as she started down the corridor with de Spain. “He’s had so much pain to-day: I hope he will sleep.”
“I hope so, too,” exclaimed de Spain fervently.
Nan ignored the implication. She looked straight ahead. She had nothing to say. De Spain, walking beside her, devoured her with his eyes; listened to her footfalls; tried to make talk; but Nan was silent.
Standing on the wide veranda outside the front door, she assented to the beauty of the distant illumination but not enthusiastically. De Spain declared it could be seen very much better from the street below. Nan thought she could see very well where they stood. But by this time she was answering questions––dryly, it is true and in monosyllables, but answering. De Spain leading the way a step or two forward at a time, coaxed her down the driveway.
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She stood again irresolute, he drinking in the fragrance of her presence after the long separation and playing her reluctance guardedly. “Do you know,” she exclaimed with sudden resentment, “you make it awfully hard to be mean to you?”
With a laugh he caught her hand and made her walk down the hospital steps. “You may be as mean as you like,” he answered indifferently. “Only, never ask me to be mean to you.”
“I wish to heaven you would be,” she retorted.
“Do you remember,” he asked, “what we were doing a year ago to-day?”
“No.” Before he could speak again she changed her answer: “Yes, I do remember. If I said ‘no’ you’d be sure to remind me of what we were doing. We can’t see as well here as we could from the steps.”
“But from here, you have the best view in Sleepy Cat of Music Mountain.”
“We didn’t come out here to see Music Mountain.”
“I come here often to look at it. You won’t let me see you––what can I do but look at where you live? How long are you going to keep me away from you?”
Nan did not answer. He urged her to speak.247“You know very well it is my people that will never be friendly with you,” she replied. “How can I be?”
They were passing a lawn settee. He sat down. She would not follow. She stood in a sort of protest at his side, but he did not release her hand. “I’ll tell you how you can be,” he returned. “Make me one of your people.”
“That never can be,” she declared stubbornly. “You know it as well as I do. Why do you say such things?” she demanded, drawing away her hand.
“Do you want to know?”
“No.”
“It’s because I love you.”
She strove to command herself: “Whether you do or not can’t make any difference,” she returned steadily. “We are separated by everything. There’s a gulf between us. It never can be crossed. We should both of us be wretched if it ever were crossed.”
He had risen from the bench and caught her hand: “It’s because we haven’t crossed it we’re wretched,” he said determinedly. “Cross it with me now!” He caught her in his arms. She struggled to escape. She knew what was coming and fought to keep her face from him. With resistless strength and yet carefully as a mother248with an obstinate child, he held her slight body against his breast, relentlessly drawing her head closer. “Let me go!” she panted, twisting her averted head from the hollow of his arm. Drinking in the wine of her frightened breath, he bent over her in the darkness until his pulsing eagerness linked her warm lips to his own. She had surrendered to his first kiss.
He spoke. “The gulf’s crossed. Are you so awfully wretched?”
They sank together down on the bench. “What,” she faltered, “will become of me now?”
“You are better off now than you ever were, Nan. You’ve gained this moment a big brother, a lover you can drag around the world after you with a piece of thread.”
“You act as if I could!”
“I mean it: it’s true. I’m pledged to you forever––you, to me, forever. We’ll keep our secret till we can manage things; and wewillmanage them. Everything will come right, Nan, because everything must come right.”
“I only hope you are not wrong,” she murmured, her eyes turned toward the sombre mountains.
249CHAPTER XIXDANGER
With never such apprehension, never such stealth, never so heavy a secret, so sensible a burning in cheek and eye, as when she tiptoed into her uncle’s room at midnight, Nan’s heart beat as the wings of a bird beat from the broken door of a cage into a forbidden sky of happiness. She had left the room a girl; she came back to it a woman.
Sleep she did not expect or even ask for; the night was all too short to think of those tense, fearful moments that had pledged her to her lover. When the anxieties of her situation overwhelmed her, as they would again and again, she felt herself in the arms of this strange, resolute man whom all her own hated and whom she knew she already loved beyond all power to put away. In her heart, she had tried this more than once: she knew she could not, would not ever do it, or even try to do it, again.
She rejoiced in his love. She trusted. When he spoke she believed this man whom no one around her would believe; and she, who never had250believed what other men avowed, and who detested their avowals, believed de Spain, and secretly, guiltily, glowed in every word of his devotion and breathed faint in its every caress.
Night could hardly come fast enough, after the next long day. A hundred times during that day she reminded herself, while the slow, majestic sun shone simmering on the hot desert, that she had promised to steal out into the grounds the minute darkness fell––he would be waiting. A hundred times in the long afternoon, Nan looked into the cloudless western sky and with puny eager hands would have pushed the lagging orb on its course that she might sooner give herself into the arms where she felt her place so sure, her honor so safe, her helplessness so protected, herself so loved.
How her cheeks burned after supper when she asked her uncle for leave to post a letter down-town! How breathless with apprehension she halted as de Spain stepped from the shadow of the trees and drew her importunately beneath them for the kiss that had burned on her troubled lips all day! How, girl-like, knowing his caresses were all her own––knowing she could at an instant call forth enough to smother her––she tyrannized his importuning and, like a lovely miser, hoarded her responsiveness under calm251eyes and laconic whispers until, when she did give back his eagerness, she made his senses reel.
How dreamily she listened to every word he let fall in his outpouring of devotion; how gravely she put up her hand to restrain his busy intrusion, and asked if he knew that no man in the world, least of all her fierce and burly cousin, had ever touched her lips until he himself forced a kiss on them the night before: “And now!” She hid her face against his shoulder. “Oh, Henry, how I love you! I’m so ashamed, I couldn’t tell you if it weren’t night: I’ll never look you in the face again in the daytime.”
And when he told her how little he himself had had to do with, and how little he knew about girls, even from boyhood, how she feigned not to believe, and believed him still! They were two children raised in the magic of an hour to the supreme height of life and dizzy together on its summit.
“I don’t see how you can care forme, Henry. Oh, I mean it,” she protested, holding her head resolutely up. “You know who we are, away off there in the mountains. Every one hates us; I suppose they’ve plenty of reason to: we hate everybody else. And why shouldn’t we? We’re at war with every one. You know, better than I do, what goes on in the Gap. I don’t want to252know; I try not to know; Uncle Duke tries to keep things from me. When you began to act––as if you cared for me––that day on Music––I couldn’t believe you meant it at all. And yet––I’m afraid I liked to try to think you did. When you looked at me I felt as if you could see right through me.”
Confidences never came to an end.
And diplomacy came into its own almost at once in de Spain’s efforts to improve his relations with the implacable Duke. The day came when Nan’s uncle could be taken home. De Spain sent to him a soft-spoken emissary, Bob Scott, offering to provide a light stage, with his compliments, for the trip. The intractable mountaineer, with his refusal to accept the olive-branch, blew Bob out of the room. Nan was crushed by the result, but de Spain was not to be dismayed.
Lefever came to him the day after Nan had got her uncle home. “Henry,” he began without any preliminaries, “there is one thing about your precipitate ride up Music Mountain that I never got clear in my mind. After the fight, your cartridge-belt was hanging up in the barn at Calabasas for two weeks. You walked in to us that morning with your belt buckled on. You told us you put it on before you came up-stairs. What? Oh, yes, I know, Henry. But that belt253wasn’t hanging down-stairs with your coat earlier in the evening. No, Henry: it wasn’t, not when I looked. Don’t tell me such things, because––I don’t know. Where was the belt when you found it?”
“Some distance from the coat, John. I admit that. I’ll tell you: some one had moved the belt. It was not where I left it. I was hurried the morning I rode in and I can’t tell you just where I found it.”
Lefever never batted an eyelash. “I know you can’t, Henry. Because you won’t. That Scotch hybrid McAlpin knows a few things, too, that he won’t tell. All I want to say is, you can trust that man too far. He’s got all my recent salary. Every time Jeffries raises my pay that hairy-pawed horse-doctor reduces it just so much a month. And he does it with one pack of fifty-two small cards that you could stick into your vest pocket.”
“McAlpin has a wife and children to support,” suggested de Spain.
“Don’t think for a moment he does it,” returned Lefever vehemently. “I support his wife and children, myself.”
“You shouldn’t play cards, John.”
“It was by playing cards that I located Sassoon, just the same. A little game with your254friend Bull Page, by the way. And say, that man blew into Calabasas one day here lately with a twenty-dollar bill; it’s a fact. Now, where do you suppose he got twenty dollars in one bill? I knowIhad it two hours after he got there and then in fifteen minutes that blamed bull-whacker you pay thirty-two a week to took it away from me. But I got Sassoon spotted. And where do you suppose Split-lips is this minute?”
“Morgan’s Gap.”
“Quite so––and been there all the time. Now, Bob has the old warrant for him: the question is, how to get him out.”
De Spain reflected a moment before replying: “John, I’d let him alone just for the present,” he said at length.
Lefever’s eyes bulged: “Let Sassoon alone?”
“He will keep––for a while, anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to stir things up too strong over that way just at the minute, John.”
“Why not?”
De Spain shuffled a little: “Well, Jeffries thinks we might let things rest till Duke Morgan and the others get over some of their soreness.”
Lefever, astonished at the indifference of de Spain to the opportunity of nabbing Sassoon,255while he could be found, expostulated strongly. When de Spain persisted, Lefever, huffed, confided to Bob Scott that when the general manager got ready he could catch Sassoon himself.
De Spain wanted for Nan’s sake, as well as his own, to see what could be done to pacify her uncle and his relatives so that a wedge might be driven in between them and their notorious henchman, and Sassoon brought to book with their consent; on this point, however, he was not quite bold-faced enough to take his friends into his confidence.
De Spain, as fiery a lover as he was a fighter, stayed none of his courting because circumstances put Music Mountain between him and his mistress. And Nan, after she had once surrendered, was nothing behind in the chances she unhesitatingly took to arrange her meetings with de Spain. He found in her, once her girlish timidity was overcome and a woman’s confidence had replaced it, a disregard of consequences, so far as their own plans were concerned, that sometimes took away his breath.
The very day after she had got her uncle home, with the aid of Satterlee Morgan and an antiquated spring wagon, Nan rode, later in the afternoon, over to Calabasas. The two that would not be restrained had made their appointment256at the lower lava beds half-way between the Gap and Calabasas. The sun was sinking behind the mountain when de Spain galloped out of the rocks as Nan turned from the trail and rode toward the black and weather-beaten meeting-place.
They could hardly slip from their saddles fast enough to reach each other’s arms––Nan, trim as a model in fresh khaki, trying with a handkerchief hardly larger than a postage-stamp to wipe the flecks of dust from her pink cheeks, while de Spain, between dabs, covered them with importunate greetings. Looking engrossed into each other’s eyes, and both, in their eagerness, talking at once, they led their horses into hiding and sat down to try to tell all that had happened since their parting. Wars and rumors of wars, feuds and raidings, fights and pursuits were no more to them than to babes in the woods. All that mattered to them––sitting or pacing together and absorbed, in the path of the long-cold volcanic stream buried in the shifting sands of the desert––was that they should clasp each other’s clinging hands, listen each to the other’s answering voice, look unrestrained into each other’s questioning eyes.
They met in both the lava beds––the upper lay between the Gap and town––more than once.257And one day came a scare. They were sitting on a little ledge well up in the rocks where de Spain could overlook the trail east and west, and were talking about a bungalow some day to be in Sleepy Cat, when they saw men riding from the west toward Calabasas. There were three in the party, one lagging well behind. The two men leading, Nan and de Spain made out to be Gale Morgan and Page. They saw the man coming on behind stop his horse and lean forward, his head bent over the trail. He was examining the sand and halted quite a minute to study something. Both knew what he was studying––the hoof-prints of Nan’s pony heading toward the lava. Nan shrank back and with de Spain moved a little to where they could watch the intruder without being seen. Nan whispered first: “It’s Sassoon.” De Spain nodded. “What shall we do?” breathed Nan.
“Nothing yet,” returned her lover, watching the horseman, whose eyes were still fixed on the pony’s trail, but who was now less than a half mile away and riding straight toward them.
De Spain, his eyes on the danger and his hand laid behind Nan’s waist, led the way guardedly down to where their horses stood. Nan, needing no instructions for the emergency, took the lines of the horses, and de Spain, standing beside his258own horse, reached his right hand over in front of the pommel and, regarding Sassoon all the while, drew his rifle slowly from its scabbard. The blood fled Nan’s cheeks. She said nothing. Without looking at her, de Spain drew her own rifle from her horse’s side, passed it into her hand and, moving over in front of the horses, laid his left hand reassuringly on her waist again. At that moment, little knowing what eyes were on him in the black fragments ahead, Sassoon looked up. Then he rode more slowly forward. The color returned to Nan’s cheeks: “Do you want me to use this?” she murmured, indicating the rifle.
“Certainly not. But if the others turn back, I may need it. Stay right here with the horses. He will lose the trail in a minute now. When he reaches the rock I’ll go down and keep him from getting off his horse––he won’t fight from the saddle.”
But with an instinct better than knowledge, Sassoon, like a wolf scenting danger, stopped again. He scanned the broken and forbidding hump in front, now less than a quarter of a mile from him, questioningly. His eyes seemed to rove inquisitively over the lava pile as if asking why a Morgan Gap pony had visited it. In another moment he wheeled his horse and spurred rapidly after his companions.
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The two drew a deep breath. De Spain laughed: “What we don’t know, never hurts us.” He drew Nan to him. Holding the rifle muzzle at arm’s length as the butt rested on the ground, she looked up from the shoulder to which she was drawn: “What should you have done if he had come?”
“Taken you to the Gap and then taken him to Sleepy Cat, where he belongs.”
“But, Henry, suppose–––”
“There wouldn’t have been any ‘suppose.’”
“Suppose the others had come.”
“With one rifle, here, a man could stand off a regiment. Nan, do you know, you fit into my arm as if you were made for it?”
His courage was contagious. When he had tired her with fresh importunities he unpinned her felt hat and held it out of reach while he kissed and toyed with and disarranged her hair. In revenge, she snatched from his pocket his little black memorandum-book and some letters and read, or pretended to read them, and seizing her opportunity she broke from him and ran with the utmost fleetness up into the rocks.
In two minutes they had forgotten the episode almost as completely as if it never had been. But when they left for home, they agreed they would not meet there again. They knew that260Sassoon, like a jackal, would surely come back, and more than once, until he found out just what that trail or any subsequent trail leading into the beds meant. The lovers laughed the jackal’s spying to scorn and rode away, bantering, racing, and chasing each other in the saddle, as solely concerned in their happiness as if there were nothing else of moment in the whole wide world.
261CHAPTER XXFACING THE MUSIC
They had not underestimated the danger from Sassoon’s suspicious malevolence. He returned next morning to read what further he could among the rocks. It was little, but it spelled a meeting of two people––Nan and another––and he was stimulated to keep his eyes and ears open for further discoveries. Moreover, continuing ease in seeing each other, undetected by hostile eyes, gradually rendered the lovers less cautious in their arrangements. The one thing that possessed their energies was to be together.
De Spain, naturally reckless, had won in Nan a girl hardly more concerned. Self-reliant, both of them, and instinctively vigilant, they spent so much time together that Scott and Lefever, who, before a fortnight had passed after Duke’s return home, surmised that de Spain must be carrying on some sort of a clandestine affair hinting toward the Gap, only questioned how long it would be before something happened, and only hoped it would not be, in their own word, unpleasant. It was not theirs in any case to admonish de262Spain, nor to dog the movements of so capable a friend even when his safety was concerned, so long as he preferred to keep his own counsel––there are limits within which no man welcomes uninvited assistance. And de Spain, in his long and frequent rides, his protracted absences, indifference to the details of business and careless humor, had evidently passed within these limits.
What was stage traffic to him compared to the sunshine on Nan’s hair; what attraction had schedules to offer against a moment of her eyes; what pleasing connection could there be between bad-order wheels and her low laugh?
The two felt they must meet to discuss their constant perplexities and the problems of their difficult situation; but when they reached their trysting-places, there was more of gayety than gravity, more of nonchalance than concern, more of looking into each other’s hearts than looking into the troublesome future. And there was hardly an inviting spot within miles of Music Mountain that one or the other of the two had not waited near.
There were, of course, disappointments, but there were only a few failures in their arrangements. The difficulties of these fell chiefly on Nan. How she overcame them was a source of surprise to de Spain, who marvelled at her innocent263resource in escaping the demands at home and making her way, despite an array of obstacles, to his distant impatience.
Midway between Music Mountain and Sleepy Cat a low-lying wall of lava rock, in part sand-covered and in part exposed, parallels and sometimes crosses the principal trail. This undulating ridge was a favorite with de Spain and Nan, because they could ride in and out of hiding-places without more than just leaving the trail itself. To the west of this ridge, and commanding it, rose rather more than a mile away the cone called Black Cap.
“Suppose,” said Nan one afternoon, looking from de Spain’s side toward the mountains, “some one should be spying on us from Black Cap?” She pointed to the solitary rock.
“If any one has been, Nan, with a good glass he must have seen exchanges of confidence over here that would make him gnash his teeth. I know if I ever saw anything like it I’d go hang. But the country around there is too rough for a horse. Nobody even hides around Black Cap, except some tramp hold-up man that’s crowded in his get-away. Bob Scott says there are dozens of mountain-lions over there.”
But Sassoon had the unpleasant patience of a mountain-lion and its dogged persistence, and,264hiding himself on Black Cap, he made certain one day of what he had long been convinced––that Nan was meeting de Spain.
The day after she had mentioned Black Cap to her lover, Nan rode over to Calabasas to get a bridle mended. Galloping back, she encountered Sassoon just inside the Gap. Nan so detested him that she never spoke when she could avoid it. On his part he pretended not to see her as she passed. When she reached home she found her Uncle Duke and Gale standing in front of the fireplace in the living-room. The two appeared from their manner to have been in a heated discussion, one that had stopped suddenly on her appearance. Both looked at Nan. The expression on their faces forewarned her. She threw her quirt on the table, drew off her riding-gloves, and began to unpin her hat; but she knew a storm was impending.
Gale had been made for a long time to know that he was an unwelcome visitor, and Nan’s greeting of him was the merest contemptuous nod. “Well, uncle,” she said, glancing at Duke, “I’m late again. Have you had supper?”
Duke always spoke curtly; to-night his heavy voice was as sharp as an axe. “Been late a good deal lately.”
Nan laid her hat on the table and, glancing265composedly from one suspicious face to the other, put her hands up to rearrange her hair. “I’m going to try to do better. I’ll go out and get my supper if you’ve had yours.” She started toward the dining-room.
“Hold on!” Nan paused at her uncle’s ferocious command. She looked at him either really or feignedly surprised, her expression changing to one of indignation, and waited for him to speak. Since he did no more than glare angrily at her, Nan lifted her brows a little. “What do you want, uncle?”
“Where did you go this afternoon?”
“Over to Calabasas,” she answered innocently.
“Who’d you meet there?” Duke’s tone snapped with anger. He was working himself into a fury, but Nan saw it must be faced. “The same people I usually meet––why?”
“Did you meet Henry de Spain there this afternoon?”
Nan looked squarely at her cousin and returned his triumphant expression defiantly before she turned her eyes on her uncle. “No,” she said collectedly. “Why?”
“Do you deny it?” he thundered.
“Yes, I deny it. Why?”
“Did you see de Spain at Calabasas this afternoon?”