407CHAPTER XXXIITHE TRUTH
With the desperation of a joy born of despair she laid her burning cheek hysterically against his cheek. She rained kisses on his ice-crusted brows and snow-beaten eyes. Her arms held him rigidly. He could not move nor speak till she would let him. Transformed, this mountain girl who gave herself so shyly, forgot everything. Her words crowded on his ears. She repeated his name in an ecstasy of welcome, drew down his lips, laughed, rejoiced, knew no shamefacedness and no restraint––she was one freed from the stroke of a descending knife. A moment before she had faced death alone; it was still death she faced––she realized this––but it was death, at least, together, and her joy and tears rose from her heart in one stream.
De Spain comforted her, quieted her, cut away one of the coats from his horse, slipped it over her shoulders, incased her in the heavy fur, and turned his eyes to Duke.
The old man’s set, square face surrendered408nothing of implacability to the dangers confronting him. De Spain looked for none of that. He had known the Morgan record too long, and faced the Morgan men too often, to fancy they would flinch at the drum-beat of death.
The two men, in the deadly, driving snow, eyed each other. Out of the old man’s deep-set eyes burned the resistance of a hundred storms faced before. But he was caught now like a wolf in a trap, and he knew he had little to hope for, little to fear. As de Spain regarded him, something like pity may have mixed with his hatred. The old outlaw was thinly clad. His open throat was beaten with snow and, standing beside the wagon, he held the team reins in a bare hand. De Spain cut the other coat from his saddle and held it out. Duke pretended not to see and, when not longer equal to keeping up the pretense, shook his head.
“Take it,” said de Spain curtly.
“No.”
“Take it, I say. You and I will settle our affairs when we get Nan out of this,” he insisted.
“De Spain!” Duke’s voice, as was its wont, cracked like a pistol, “I can say all I’ve got to say to you right here.”
“No.”
“Yes,” cried the old man.
409
“Listen, Henry,” pleaded Nan, seeking shelter from the furious blast within his arm, “just for a moment, listen!”
“Not now, I tell you!” cried de Spain.
“He was coming, Henry, all the way––and he is sick––just to say it to you. Let him say it here, now.”
“Go on!” cried de Spain roughly. “Say it.”
“I’m not afraid of you, de Spain!” shouted the old man, his neck bared to the flying ice. “Don’t think it! You’re a better man than I am, better than I ever was––don’t think I don’t know that. But I’m not afraid of e’er a man I faced, de Spain; they’ll tell you that when I’m dead. All the trouble that ever come ’tween you and me come by an accident––come before you was born, and come through Dave Sassoon, and he’s held it over me ever since you come up into this country. I was a young fellow. Sassoon worked for my father. The cattle and sheep war was on, north of Medicine Bend. The Peace River sheepmen raided our place––your father was with them. He never did us no harm, but my brother, Bay Morgan, was shot in that raid by a man name of Jennings. My brother was fifteen years old, de Spain. I started out to get the man that shot him. Sassoon trailed him to the Bar M, the old de Spain ranch, working for your father.”
410
The words fell fast and in a fury. They came as if they had been choked back till they strangled. “Sassoon took me over there. Toward night we got in sight of the ranch-house. We saw a man down at the corral. ‘That’s Jennings,’ Sassoon says. I never laid eyes on him before––I never laid eyes on your father before. Both of us fired. Next day we heard your father was killed, and Jennings had left the country. Sassoon or I, one of us, killed your father, de Spain. If it was I, I did it never knowing who he was, never meaning to touch him. I was after the man that killed my brother. Sassoon didn’t care a damn which it was, never did, then nor never. But he held it over me to make trouble sometime ’twixt you and me. I was a young fellow. I thought I was revenging my brother. And if your father was killed by a patched bullet, his blood is not on me, de Spain, and never was. Sassoon always shot a patched bullet. I never shot one in my life. And I’d never told you this of my own self. Nan said it was the whole truth from me to you, or her life. She’s as much mine as she is yours. I nursed her. I took care of her when there weren’t no other living soul to do it.She got me and herself out into this, this morning. I’d never been caught like this if I’d had my way.I told her ’fore we’d been out an hour we’d never see the end of411it. She said she’d rather die in it than you’d think she quit you. I told her I’d go on with her and do as she said––that’s why we’re here, and that’s the whole truth, so help me God!
“I ain’t afraid of you, de Spain. I’ll give you whatever you think’s coming to you with a rifle or a gun any time, anywhere––you’re a better man than I am or ever was, I know that––and that ought to satisfy you. Or, I’ll stand my trial, if you say so, and tell the truth.”
The ice-laden wind, as de Spain stood still, swept past the little group with a sinister roar, insensible alike to its emotions and its deadly peril. Within the shelter of his arm he felt the yielding form of the indomitable girl who, by the power of love, had wrung from the outlaw his reluctant story––the story of the murder that had stained with its red strands the relations of each of their lives to both the others. He felt against his heart the faint trembling of her frail body. So, when a boy, he had held in his hand a fluttering bird and felt the whirring beat of its frightened heart against his strong, cruel fingers.
A sudden aversion to more bloodshed, a sickening of vengeance, swept over him as her heart mutely beat for mercy against his heart. She had done more than any man could do. Now412her. In the breathless embrace that drew her closer she read her answer from him. She looked up into his eyes and waited. “There’s more than what’s between you and me, Duke, facing us now,” said de Spain sternly, when he turned. “We’ve got to get Nan out of this––even if we don’t get out ourselves. Where do you figure we are?” he cried.
“I figure we’re two miles north of the lava beds, de Spain,” shouted Morgan.
De Spain shook his head in dissent. “Then where are we?” demanded the older man rudely.
“I ought not to say, against you. But if I’ve got to guess, I say two miles east. Either way, we must try for Sleepy Cat. Is your team all right?”
“Team is all right. We tore a wheel near off getting out of the lava. The wagon’s done for.”
De Spain threw the fur coat at him. “Put it on,” he said. “We’ll look at the wheel.”
They tried together to wrench it into shape, but worked without avail. In the end they lashed it, put Nan on the Lady, and walked behind while the team pushed into the pitiless wind. Morgan wanted to cut the wagon away and take to the horses, but de Spain said, not till they found a trail or the stage road.
So much snow had fallen that in spite of the413blizzard, driving with an unrelenting fury, the drifts were deepening, packing, and making all effort increasingly difficult. It was well-nigh impossible to head the horses into the storm, and de Spain looked with ever more anxious eyes at Nan. After half an hour’s superhuman struggle to regain a trail that should restore their bearings, they halted, and de Spain, riding up to the wagon, spoke to Morgan, who was driving: “How long is this going to last?”
“All day and all night.” Nan leaned closely over to hear the curt question and answer. Neither man spoke again for a moment.
“We’ll have to have help,” said de Spain after a pause.
“Help?” echoed Morgan scornfully. “Where’s help coming from?”
De Spain’s answer was not hurried. “One of us must go after it.” Nan looked at him intently.
Duke set his hard jaw against the hurtling stream of ice that showered on the forlorn party. “I’ll go for it,” he snapped.
“No,” returned de Spain. “Better for me to go.”
“Go together,” said Nan.
De Spain shook his head. Duke Morgan, too, said that only one should go; the other must stay. De Spain, while the storm rattled and414shook at the two men, told why he should go himself. “It’s not claiming you are not entitled to say who should go, Duke,” he said evenly. “Nor that our men, anywhere you reach, wouldn’t give you the same attention they would me. And it isn’t saying that you’re not the better man for the job––you’ve travelled the Sinks longer than I have. But between you and me, Duke, it’s twenty-eight years against fifty. I ought to hold out a while the longer, that’s all. Let’s work farther to the east.”
Quartering against the mad hurricane, they drove and rode on until the team could hardly be urged to further effort against the infuriated elements––de Spain riding at intervals as far to the right and the left as he dared in vain quest of a landmark. When he halted beside the wagon for the last time he was a mass of snow and ice; horse and rider were frozen to each other. He got down to the ground with a visible effort, and in the singing wind told Duke his plan and purpose.
He had chosen on the open desert a hollow falling somewhat abruptly from the north, and beneath its shoulder, while Morgan loosened the horses, he scooped and kicked away a mass of snow. The wagon had been drawn just above the point of refuge, and the two men, with the aid of the wind, dumped it over sidewise, making of415the body a windbreak over the hollow, a sort of roof, around which the snow, driven by the gale, would heap itself in hard waves. Within this shelter the men stowed Nan. The horses were driven down behind it, and from one of them de Spain took the collar, the tugs, and the whiffletree. He stuck a hitching-strap in his pocket, and while Morgan steadied the Lady’s head, de Spain buckled the collar on her, doubled the tugs around the whiffletree, and fastened the roll at her side in front of the saddle.
Nan came out and stood beside him as he worked. When he had finished she put her hand on his sleeve. He held her close, Duke listening, to tell her what he meant to try to do. Each knew it well might be the last moment together. “One thing and another have kept us from marriage vows, Nan,” said de Spain, beckoning at length to Morgan to step closer that he might clearly hear. “Nothing must keep us longer. Will you marry me?”
She looked up into his eyes. “I’ve promised you I would. I will promise every time you ask me. I nevercouldhave but one answer to that, Henry––it must always be yes!”
“Then take me, Henry,” he said slowly, “here and now for your wedded husband. Will you do this, Nan?”
416“I’ve promised you I would. I will promise every time you ask me.”
“I’ve promised you I would. I will promise every time you ask me.”
417
Still looking into his eyes, she answered without surprise or fear: “Henry, I do take you.”
“And I, Henry, take you, Nan, here and now for my wedded wife, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, from this day forward, until death us do part.”
They sealed their pact with a silent embrace. De Spain turned to Duke. “You are the witness of this marriage, Duke. You will see, if an accident happens, that anything, everything I have––some personal property––my father’s old ranch north of Medicine Bend––some little money in bank at Sleepy Cat––goes to my wife, Nan Morgan de Spain. Will you see to it?”
“I will. And if it comes to me––you, de Spain, will see to it that what stock I have in the Gap goes to my niece, Nan, your wife.”
She looked from one to the other of the two men. “All that I have,” she said in turn, “the lands in the Gap, everywhere around Music Mountain, go to you two equally together, or whichever survives. And if you both live, and I do not, remember my last message––bury the past in my grave.”
Duke Morgan tested the cinches of the saddle on the Lady once more, unloosed the tugs once more from the horse’s shoulder, examined each buckle of the collar and every inch of the two418strips of leather, the reinforced fastenings on the whiffletree, rolled all up again, strapped it, and stood by the head till de Spain swung up into the saddle. He bent down once to whisper a last word of cheer to his wife and, without looking back, headed the Lady into the storm.
419CHAPTER XXXIIIGAMBLING WITH DEATH
Beyond giving his horse a safe headway from the shelter, de Spain made little effort to guide her. He had chosen the Lady, not because she was fresher, for she was not, but because he believed she possessed of the three horses the clearest instinct to bring her through the fight for the lives that were at stake. He did not deceive himself with the idea he could do anything to help the beast find a way to succor; that instinct rested wholly in the Lady’s head, not in his. He only knew that if she could not get back to help, he could not. His own part in the effort was quite outside any aid to the Lady––it was no more than to reach alive whatever aid she could find, that he might direct it to where Nan and her companion would endure a few hours longer the fury of the storm.
His own struggle for life, he realized, was with the wind––the roaring wind that hurled its broadsides of frozen snow in monstrous waves across the maddened sky, challenging every living thing.420It drove icy knives into his face and ears, paralyzed in its swift grasp his muscles and sinews, fought the stout flow of blood through his veins, and searched his very heart to still it.
Encouraging the Lady with kind words, and caressing her in her groping efforts as she turned head and tail from the blinding sheets of snow and ice, de Spain let her drift, hoping she might bring them through, what he confessed in his heart to be, the narrowest of chances.
He bent low in his saddle under the unending blasts. He buffeted his legs and arms to fight off the fatal cold. He slipped more than once from his seat, and with a hand on the pommel tramped beside the horse to revive his failing circulation; there would come a time, he realized, when he could no longer climb up again, but he staved that issue off to the last possible moment of endurance, because the Lady made better time when he was on her back. When the struggle to remount had been repeated until nature could no longer by any staggering effort be made to respond to his will, until his legs were no longer a part of his benumbed being––until below his hips he had no body answerable to his commands, but only two insensible masses of lead that anchored him to the ground––he still forced the frozen feet to carry him, in a feeble, monstrous gait beside421the Lady, while he dragged with his hands on the saddle for her patient aid.
One by one every thought, as if congealed in their brain cells, deserted his mind––save the thought that he must not freeze to death. More than once he had hoped the insensate fury of the blizzard might abate. The Lady had long since ceased to try to face it––like a stripped vessel before a hurricane, she was drifting under it. De Spain realized that his helpless legs would not carry him farther. His hands, freezing to the pommel, no longer supported him. They finally slipped from it and he fell prostrate in the snow beside his horse. When he would cry out to her his frozen lips could mumble no words. It was the fight no longer of a man against nature, but only of an indomitable soul against a cruel, hateful death. He struggled to his feet only to fall again more heavily. He pulled himself up this time by the stirrup-strap, got his hands and arms up to the pommel, and clung to it for a few paces more. But he fell at last, and could no longer rise from the ground. The storm swept unceasingly on.
The Lady, checked by the lines wrapped on his arm, stopped. De Spain lay a moment, then backed her up a step, pulled her head down by the bridle, clasped his wooden arms around her422neck, spoke to her and, lifting her head, the mare dragged him to his feet. Clumsily and helplessly he loosened the tugs and the whiffletree, beat his hands together with idiotic effort, hooked the middle point of the whiffletree into the elbow of his left arm, brought the forearm and hand up flat against his shoulder, and with the hitching-strap lashed his forearm and upper arm tightly together around the whiffletree.
He drew the tugs stiffly over the Lady’s back, unloosed the cinches of the saddle, pushed it off the horse and, sinking into the snow behind her, struck with his free arm at her feet. Relieved of the saddle, the Lady once more started, dragging slowly behind her through the snow a still breathing human being. Less than an hour before it had been a man. It was hardly more now, as the Lady plodded on, than an insensate log. But not even death could part it again from the horse to which de Spain, alive, had fastened it.
The fearful pain from the tortured arm, torn at times almost from its socket, the gradual snapping of straining ligaments, the constant rupture of capillaries and veins sustained his consciousness for a while. Then the torturing pain abated, the rough dragging shattered the bruised body less. It was as if the Lady and the storm together were making easier for the slowly dying man his last423trail across the desert. He still struggled to keep alive, by sheer will-power, flickering sparks of consciousness, and to do so concentrated every thought on Nan. It was a poignant happiness to summon her picture to his fainting senses; he knew he should hold to life as long as he could think of her. Love, stronger than death, welled in his heart. The bitter cold and the merciless wind were kinder as he called her image from out of the storm. She seemed to speak––to lift him in her arms. Ahead, distant mountains rose, white-peaked. The sun shone. He rode with her through green fields, and a great peace rested on his weary senses.
Lady Jane, pushing on and on, enlightened by that instinct before which the reason of man is weak and pitiful, seeing, as it were, through the impenetrable curtain of the storm where refuge lay, herself a slow-moving crust of frozen snow, dragged to her journey’s end––to the tight-shut doors of the Calabasas barn––her unconscious burden, and stood before them patiently waiting until some one should open for her. It was one of the heartbreaks of a tragic day that no one ever knew just when the Lady reached the door or how long she and her unconscious master waited in the storm for admission. A startled exclamation424from John Lefever, who had periodically and anxiously left the red-hot stove in the office to walk moodily to the window, brought the men tumbling over one another as he ran from his companions to throw open the outer door and pull the drooping horse into the barn.
It was the Indian, Scott, who, reading first of all the men everything in the dread story, sprang forward with a stifled exclamation, as the horse dragged in the snow-covered log, whipped a knife from his pocket, cut the incumbered arm and white hand free from the whiffletree and, carrying the stiffened body into the office, began with insane haste to cut away the clothing.
Lefever, perceiving it was de Spain thus drawn to their feet, shouted, while he tore from the blade of Scott’s knife the frozen garments, the orders for the snow, the heated water, the warm blankets, the alcohol and brandy, and, stripped to his waist, chafed the marble feet. The Indian, better than a staff of doctors, used the cunning of a sorcerer to revive the spark of inanimate life not yet extinguished by the storm. A fearful interval of suspense followed the silence into which the work settled, a silence broken only by the footsteps of men running to and from the couch over which Scott, Lefever, and McAlpin, half-naked, worked in mad concert.
425
De Spain opened his eyes to wander from one to the other of the faces. He half rose up, struggling in a frenzy with the hands that restrained him. While his companions pleaded to quiet him, he fought them until, restored to its seat of reason, his mind reasserted itself and, lying exhausted, he told them in his exquisite torture of whom he had left, and what must be done to find and bring them in.
While the relief wagons, equipped with straining teams and flanked by veteran horsemen, were dashing out of the barn, he lapsed into unconsciousness. But he had been able to hold Scott’s hand long enough to tell him he must find Nan and bring her in, or never come back.
It was Scott who found her. In their gropings through the blizzard the three had wandered nearer Calabasas than any one of them dreamed. And on the open desert, far south and east of the upper lava beds, it was Scott’s horse that put a foot through the bottom of the overturned wagon box. The suspected mound of snow, with the buried horses scrambling to their feet, rose upright at the crash. Duke crouched, half-conscious, under the rude shelter. Lying where he had placed her, snugly between the horses, Scott found Nan. He spoke to her when she opened her staring eyes, picked her up in his arms, called426to his companions for the covered wagon, and began to restore her, without a moment of delay, to life. He even promised if she would drink the hateful draft he put to her lips and let him cut away her shoes and leggings and the big coat frozen on her, that in less than an hour she should see Henry de Spain alive and well.
427CHAPTER XXXIVAT SLEEPY CAT
Nothing in nature, not even the storm itself, is so cruel as the beauty of the after calm. In the radiance of the sunshine next day de Spain, delirious and muttering, was taken to the hospital at Sleepy Cat. In an adjoining room lay Nan, moaning reproaches at those who were torturing her reluctantly back to life. Day and night the doctors worked over the three. The town, the division, the stagemen, and the mountain-men watched the outcome of the struggle. From as far as Medicine Bend railroad surgeons came to aid in the fight.
De Spain cost the most acute anxiety. The crux of the battle, after the three lives were held safe, centred on the effort to save de Spain’s arm––the one he had chosen to lose, if he must lose one, when he strapped it to the whiffletree. The day the surgeons agreed that if his life were to be saved the arm must come off at the shoulder a gloom fell on the community.
In a lifetime of years there can come to the greater part of us but a few days, a few hours, sometimes no more than a single moment, to show428of what stuff we are really made. Such a crisis came that day to Nan. Already she had been wheeled more than once into de Spain’s room, to sit where she could help to woo him back to life. The chief surgeon, in the morning, told Nan of the decision. In her hospital bed she rose bolt upright. “No!” she declared solemnly. “You shan’t take his arm off!”
The surgeon met her rebellion tactfully. But he told Nan, at last, that de Spain must lose either his arm or his life. “No,” she repeated without hesitation and without blanching, “you shan’t take off his arm. He shan’t lose his life.”
The blood surged into her cheeks––better blood and redder than the doctors had been able to bring there––such blood as de Spain alone could call into them. Nan, with her nurse’s help, dressed, joined de Spain, and talked long and earnestly. The doctors, too, laid the situation before him. When they asked him for his decision, he nodded toward Nan. “She will tell you, gentlemen, what we’ll do.”
And Nan did tell them what the two who had most at stake in the decision would do. Any man could have done as much as that. But Nan did more. She set herself out to save the arm and patient both, and, lest the doctors should change their tactics and move together on the429arm surreptitiously, Nan stayed night and day with de Spain, until he was able to make such active use of either arm as to convince her that he, and not the surgeons, would soon need the most watching.
Afterward when Nan, in some doubt, asked the chaplain whether she was married or single, he obligingly offered to ratify and confirm the desert ceremony.
This affair was the occasion for an extraordinary round-up at Sleepy Cat. Two long-hostile elements––the stage and railroad men and the Calabasas-Morgan Gap contingent of mountain-men, for once at least, fraternized. Warrants were pigeonholed, suspicion suspended, side-arms neglected in their scabbards. The fighting men of both camps, in the presence of a ceremony that united de Spain and Nan Morgan, could not but feel a generous elation. Each party considered that it was contributing to the festivity in the bride and the groom the very best each could boast, and no false note disturbed the harmony of the notable day.
Gale Morgan, having given up the fight, had left the country. Satterlee Morgan danced till all the platforms in town gave way. John Lefever attended the groom, and Duke Morgan sternly, but without compunction, gave the bride.430From Medicine Bend, Farrell Kennedy brought a notable company of de Spain’s early associates for the event. It included Whispering Smith, whose visit to Sleepy Cat on this occasion was the first in years; George McCloud, who had come all the way from Omaha to join his early comrades in arms; Wickwire, who had lost none of his taciturn bluntness––and so many train-despatchers that the service on the division was crippled for the entire day.
A great company of self-appointed retainers gathered together from over all the country, rode behind the gayly decorated bridal-coach in procession from the church to Jeffries’s house, where the feasts had been prepared. During the reception a modest man, dragged from an obscure corner among the guests, was made to take his place next Lefever on the receiving-line. It was Bob Scott, and he looked most uncomfortable until he found a chance to slip unobserved back to the side of the room where the distinguished Medicine Bend contingent, together with McAlpin, Pardaloe, Elpaso, and Bull Page, slightly unsteady, but extremely serious for the grave occasion, appeared vastly uncomfortable together.
The railroad has not yet been built across the Sinks to Thief River. But only those who lived431in Sleepy Cat in its really wild stage days are entitled to call themselves early settlers, or to tell stories more or less authentic about what then happened. The greater number of the Old Guard of that day, as cankering peace gradually reasserted itself along the Sinks, turned from the stage coach to the railroad coach; some of them may yet be met on the trains in the mountain country. Wherever you happen to find such a one, he will tell you of the days when Superintendent de Spain of the Western Division wore a gun in the mountains and used it, when necessary, on his wife’s relations.
Whether it was this stern sense of discipline or not that endeared him to the men, these old-timers are, to a man, very loyal to the young couple who united in their marriage the two hostile mountain elements. One in especial, a white-haired old man, described by the fanciful as a retired outlaw, living yet on Nan’s ranch in the Gap, always spends his time in town at the de Spain home, where he takes great interest in an active little boy, Morgan de Spain, who waits for his Uncle Duke’s coming, and digs into his pockets for rattles captured along the trail from recent huge rattlesnakes. When his uncle happens to kill a big one––one with twelve or thirteen rings and a button––Morgan uses it to scare his younger432sister, Nan. And Duke, secretly rejoicing at his bravado, but scolding sharply, helps him adjust the old ammunition-belt dragged from the attic, and cuts fresh gashes in it to make it fit the childish waist. His mother doesn’t like to see her son in warlike equipment, ambushing little Nan in the way Bob Scott says the Indians used to do. She threatens periodically to burn the belt up and throw the old rifles out of the house. But when she sees her uncle and her husband watching the boy and laughing at the parade together, she relents. It is only children, after all, that keep the world young.
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