"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."

CHAPTER XVIII

HER 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 pa.s.ses forty--was heavy, and the fall a serious one. He picked himself up while the men 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-sh.e.l.led 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 traditions of 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing 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--who was 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-room without de Spain's name coming in some way into the talk, to be followed with varying circ.u.mstantial 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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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--his sleeve 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 mentioned his 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 an incoherent 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."

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.

His monosyllabic answer was calm: "Do." Then as she laid her hand on the k.n.o.b of the door to enter the room: "Can I help any?"

"Oh, no!" she cried indignantly.

He laughed silently: "I'll stay here."