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 a.s.sented 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.

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. "You know very well it is my people that will never be friendly with you," she replied. "How can I be?"

They were pa.s.sing 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 mother with 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 we _will_ manage 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.

CHAPTER XIX

DANGER

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 had believed 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, h.o.a.rded her responsiveness under calm eyes 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 for _me_, 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 to know; 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 belt wasn'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 Sa.s.soon, just the same. A little game with your friend 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 know _I_ had 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 Sa.s.soon spotted. And where do you suppose Split-lips is this minute?"