"But he is a cousin."

"Then I suppose he must be one of mine."

"Unless he tries to kill you."

"He won't be very long in trying that. And now, what about yourself?

What have you got to defend yourself against him, and against every other drunken man?"

She laid her own pistol without a word in de Spain's hand. He felt it, opened, closed, and gave it back. "That's a good defender--when it's in reach. When it's at home it's a poor one."

"It will never be at home again except when I am."

"Shall I tell you a secret?"

"What is it?" asked Nan unsuspectingly.

"We are engaged to be married." She sprang from him like a deer. "It's a dead secret," he said gravely; "n.o.body knows it yet--not even you."

"You need never talk again like that if you want to be friends with me," she said indignantly. "I hate it."

"Hate it if you will; it's so. And it began when you handed me that little bit of lead and bra.s.s on the mountain to-night, to defend your life and mine."

"I'll hate you if you persecute me the way Gale does. The moon is almost up. You must go."

"What have you on your feet, Nan?"

"Moccasins." He stooped down and felt one with his hand. She drew her foot hastily away. "What a girl to manage!" he exclaimed.

"I'm going home," she said with decision.

"Don't for a minute yet, Nan," he pleaded. "Think how long it will be before I can ever see you again!"

"You may never see anybody again if you don't realize your danger to-night. Can you ride with a hackamore?"

"Like a dream."

"I didn't dare bring anything else."

"You haven't told me," he persisted, "how you got away at all." They had walked out of the trees. He looked reluctantly to the east. "Tell me and I'll go," he promised.

"After I went up to my room I waited till the house was all quiet.

Then I started for Calabasas. When I came back I got up to my room without being seen, and sat at the window a long time. I waited till all the men stopped riding past. Then I climbed through the window and down the kitchen roof, and let myself down to the ground. Some more men came past, and I hid on the porch and slipped over to the horse barns and found a hackamore, and went down to the corral and hunted around till I found this little pinto--she's the best to ride bareback."

"I could ride a razorback--why take all that trouble for me?"

"If you don't start while you have a chance, you undo everything I have tried to do to avoid a fight."

The wind, stirring softly, set the aspen leaves quivering. The stars, chilled in the thin, clear night air, hung diamond-like in the heavens and the eastern sky across the distant desert paled for the rising moon. The two standing at the horse's head listened a moment together in the darkness. De Spain, leaning forward, said something in a low, laughing voice. Nan made no answer. Then, bending, he took her hand and, before she could release it, caught it up to his lips.

For a long time after he had gone she stood, listening for a shot--wondering, breathless at moments, whether de Spain could get past the waiting traps. The moon came up, and still lingering, torn with suspense, she watched a drift of fleecy clouds darken it. She scanned anxiously the wrinkled face of the desert which, with a woman's craft, hides at night the accidents of age. It seemed to Nan as if she could overlook every foot of the motionless sea for miles before her; but she well knew how much it could conceal of ambush and death even when it professed so fairly to reveal all. Strain her ears as she would, the desert gave back no ripple of sound. No shot echoed from its sinister recesses--not even the clatter of retreating hoofs.

De Spain, true to all she had ever heard of his Indian-like stealth, had left her side unabashed and unafraid--living, laughing, paying bold court to her even when she stubbornly refused to be courted--and had made himself in the twinkling of an eye a part of the silence beyond--the silence of the night, the wind, the stars, the waste of sand, and of all the mystery that brooded upon it. She would have welcomed, in her keen suspense, a sound of some kind, some reminder that he yet lived and could yet laugh; none came.

When it seemed as if an hour must have pa.s.sed Nan felt her way noiselessly home. She regained her room as she had left it, through her east window, and, throwing herself across her bed, fell into a heavy sleep.

Day was breaking when the night boss, standing in the doorway at the Calabasas barns, saw a horseman riding at a leisurely pace up the Thief River road. The barnman scrutinized the approaching stranger closely. There was something strange and something familiar in the outlines of the figure. But when the night-rider had dismounted in front of the barn door, turned his horse loose, and, limping stiffly, walked forward on foot, the man rubbed his eyes hard before he could believe them. Then he uttered an incredulous greeting and led Henry de Spain into the barn office.

"There's friends of yours in your room up-stairs right now," he declared, bulging with shock. De Spain, sitting down, forbade the barnman to disturb them, only asking who they were.

When he had asked half a dozen more leisurely questions and avoided answering twice as many, the barnman at de Spain's request helped him up-stairs. Beside himself with excitement, the night boss turned, grinning, as he laid one hand on the door-k.n.o.b and the other on de Spain's shoulder.

"You couldn't have come," he whispered loudly, "at a better time."

The entryway was dark, and from the silence within the room one might have thought its occupants, if there were such, wrapped in slumber.

But at intervals a faint clicking sound could be heard. The night man threw open the door. By the light of two stage dash-lamps, one set on the dresser and the other on a window-ledge, four men sat about a rickety table in a life-and-death struggle at cards. No voice broke the tense silence, not even when the door was thrown broadly open.

No one--neither Lefever, Scott, Frank Elpaso, nor McAlpin--looked up when de Spain walked into the room and, with the night man tiptoeing behind, advanced composedly toward the group. Even then his presence would have pa.s.sed unnoticed, but that Bob Scott's ear mechanically recorded the limping step and transmitted to his trained intelligence merely notice of something unusual.

Scott, picking up his cards one at a time as Lefever dealt, raised his eyes. Startling as the sight of the man given up for dead must have been, no muscle of Bob Scott's body moved. His expression of surprise slowly dissolved into a grin that mutely invited the others, as he had found out for himself, to find out for themselves.

Lefever finished his deal, threw down the pack, and picked up his hand. His suspicious eyes never rose above the level of the faces at the table; but when he had thumbed his cards and looked from one to the other of the remaining players to read the weather-signals, he perceived on Scott's face an unwonted expression, and looked to where the scout's gaze was turned for an explanation of it. Lefever's own eyes at the sight of the thinned, familiar face behind Elpaso's chair, starting, opened like full moons. The big fellow spread one hand out, his cards hidden within it, and with the other hand prudently drew down his pile of chips. "Gentlemen," he said lightly, "this game is interned." He rose and put a silent hand across the table over Elpaso's shoulder. "Henry," he exclaimed impa.s.sively, "one question, if you please--and only one: How in thunder did you do it?"

CHAPTER XVII

STRATEGY

One week went to repairs. To a man of action such a week is longer than ten years of service. But chained to a bed in the Sleepy Cat hospital, de Spain had no escape from one week of thinking, and for that week he thought about Nan Morgan.

He rebelled at the situation that had placed him at enmity with her kinsfolk, yet he realized there was no help for this. The Morgans were a law unto themselves. Hardened men with a hardened code, they lived in their fastness like Ishmaelites. Counselled by their leader, old Duke Morgan, brains of the clan and influential enough to keep outside the penalties of the law themselves, their understanding with the outlaws of the Sinks was apparently complete, and the hospitality of one or another of their following within the Gap afforded a refuge for practically any mountain criminal.

But none of these reflections lightened de Spain's burden of discontent. One thought alone possessed him--Nan; her comely body, which he worshipped to the tips of her graceful fingers; her alert mind, which he saw reflected in the simplest thought she expressed; her mobile lips, which he followed to the least sound they gave forth!

The longer he pictured her, figured as she had appeared to him like a phantom on Music Mountain, the more he longed to be back at the foot of it, wounded again and famished. And the impulse that moved him the first moment he could get out of bed and into a saddle was to spur his way hard and fast to her; to make her, against a score of burly cousins, his own; and never to release her from his sudden arms again.

With de Spain, to think was to do; at least to do something, but not without further careful thinking, and not without antic.i.p.ating every chance of failure. And his manner was to cast up all difficulties and obstacles in a situation, brush them aside, and have his will if the heavens fell. Such a temperament he had inherited from his father's fiery heart and his mother's suffering, close-set lips as he had remembered them in the little pictures of her; and he now set himself, while doing his routine work every day, to do one particular thing--to see, talk to, plead with, struggle with the woman, or girl, rather--child even, to his thoughts, so fragile she was--this girl who had given him back his life against her own marauding relatives.

For many days Nan seemed a match for all the wiles de Spain could use to catch sight of her. He spent his days riding up and down the line on horseback; driving behind his team; on the stages; in and out of the streets of Sleepy Cat--nominally looking for stock, for equipment, for supplies, or frankly for nothing--but always looking for Nan.

His friends saw that something was absorbing him in an unusual, even an extraordinary way, yet none could arrive at a certain conclusion as to what it was. When Scott in secret conference was appealed to by Jeffries, he smiled foolishly, at a loss, and shook his head.

Lefever argued with less reticence. "It stands to reason, Jeffries. A man that went through that ten minutes at Calabasas would naturally think a good deal about what he is getting out of his job, and what his future chances are for being promoted any minute, day or night, by a forty-five."