It was on Nan that the real hardships of the situation fell, and Nan who had to bear them alone and almost unaided.

Duke came home a day or two later without a word for Nan concerning his encounter with de Spain. He was shorter in the grain than ever, crustier to every one than she had ever known him--and toward Nan herself fiercely resentful. Sa.s.soon was in his company a great deal, and Nan knew of old that Sa.s.soon was a bad symptom. Gale, too, came often, and the three were much together. In some way, Nan felt that she herself was in part the subject of their talks, but no information concerning them could she ever get.

One morning she sat on the porch sewing when Gale rode up. He asked for her uncle. Bonita told him Duke had gone to Calabasas. Gale announced he was bound for Calabasas himself, and dismounted near Nan, professedly to cinch his saddle. He fussed with the straps for a minute, trying to engage Nan in the interval, without success, in conversation. "Look here, Nan," he said at length, studiously amiable, "don't you think you're pretty hard on me, lately?"

"No, I don't," she answered. "If Uncle Duke didn't make me, I'd never look at you, or speak to you--or live in the same mountains with you."

"I don't think when a fellow cares for you as much as I do, and gets out of patience once in a while, just because he loves a girl the way a red-blooded man can't help loving her, she ought to hold it against him forever. Think she ought to, Nan?" he demanded after a pause. She was sewing and had kept silence.

"I think," she responded, showing her aversion in every syllable, "before a man begins to talk red-blood rot, he ought to find out whether the girl cares for him, or just loathes the sight of him."

He regarded her fixedly. Paying no attention to him, but bending in the sunshine over her sewing, her hand flying with the needle, her ma.s.ses of brown hair sweeping back around her pink ears and curling in stray ringlets that the wind danced with while she worked, she inflamed her brawny cousin's ardor afresh. "You used to care for me, Nan. You can't deny that." Her silence was irritating. "Can you?" he demanded. "Come, put up your work and talk it out. I didn't use to have to coax you for a word and a smile. What's come over you?"

"Nothing has come over me, Gale. I did use to like you--when I first came back from school. You seemed so big and fine then, and were so nice to me. I did like you."

"Why didn't you keep on liking me?"

Nan made no answer. Her cousin persisted. "You used to talk about thinking the world of me," she said at last; "then I saw you one Frontier Day, riding around Sleepy Cat with a carriage full of women."

Gale burst into a huge laugh. Nan's face flushed. She bent over her work. "Oh, that's what's the matter with you, is it?" he demanded jocularly. "You never mentioned _that_ before."

"That isn't the only thing," she continued after a pause.

"Why, that was just some Frontier Day fun, Nan. A man's got to be a little bit of a sport once in a while, hasn't he?"

"Not if he likes me." She spoke with an ominous distinctness, but under her breath. He caught her words and laughed again. "Pshaw, I didn't think you'd get jealous over a little thing like that, Nan.

When there's a celebration on in town, everybody's friendly with everybody else. If you lay a little thing like that up against me, where would the rest of the men get off? Your strawberry-faced Medicine Bend friend is celebrating in town most of the time."

Her face turned white. "What a falsehood!" she exclaimed hotly.

Looking at her, satisfied, he laughed whole-heartedly again. She rose, furious. "It's a falsehood," she repeated, "and I know it."

"I suppose," retorted Gale, regarding her jocosely, "you asked him about it."

He had never seen her so angry. She stamped her foot. "How dare you say such a thing! One of those women was at the hospital--she is there yet, and she is going to die there. She told Uncle Duke's nurse the men they knew, and whom they didn't know, at that place. And Henry de Spain, when he heard this miserable creature had been taken to the hospital, and Doctor Torpy said she could never get well, told the Sister to take care of her and send the bills to him, because he knew her father and mother in Medicine Bend and went to school with her there when she was a decent girl. Go and hear what _she_ has to say about Henry de Spain, you contemptible falsifier."

Gale laughed sardonically. "That's right. I like to see a girl stick to her friends. De Spain ought to take care of her. Good story."

"And she has other good stories, too, you ought to hear," continued Nan undismayed. "Most of them about you and your fine friends in town.

She told the nurse it's _you_ who ought to be paying her bills till she dies."

Gale made a disclaiming face and a deprecating gesture. "No, no, Nan--let de Spain take care of his own. Be a sport yourself, girlie, right now." He stepped nearer her. Nan retreated. "Kiss and make up,"

he exclaimed with a laugh. But she knew he was angry, and knew what to guard against. Still laughing, he sprang toward her and tried to catch her arm.

"Don't touch me!" she cried, jumping away with her hand in her blouse.

"You little vixen," he exclaimed with an oath, "what have you got there?" But he halted at her gesture, and Nan, panting, stood her ground.

"Keep away!" she cried.

"Where did you get that knife?" thundered Gale.

"From one who showed me how to use it on a coward!"

He affected amus.e.m.e.nt and tried to pa.s.s the incident off as a joke.

But his dissimulation was more dangerous, she knew, than his brutality, and he left her the prey to more than one alarm and the renewed resolve never to be taken off her guard. That night he came back. He told her uncle, glancing admiringly at Nan as he recounted the story, how she had stood her ground against him in the morning.

Nor did Nan like the way her uncle acted while he listened--and afterward. He talked a good deal about Gale and the way she was treating her cousin. When Nan declared she never would have anything to do with him, her uncle told her with disconcerting bluntness to get all that out of her head, for she was going to marry him. When she protested she never would, Duke told her, with many harsh oaths, that she should never marry de Spain even if he had to kill him or get killed to stop it, and that if she had any sense she would get ready to marry her cousin peaceably, adding, that if she didn't have sense, he would see himself it was provided for her.

His threats left Nan aghast. For two days she thought them all over.

Then she dressed to go to town. On her way to the barn her uncle intercepted her. "Where you going?"

"To Sleepy Cat," returned Nan, regarding him collectedly.

"No, you're not," he announced bluntly.

Nan looked at him in silence. "I don't want you running to town any more to meet de Spain," added Duke, without any attempt to soften his injunction.

"But I've got to go to town once in a while, whether I meet Henry de Spain or not, Uncle Duke."

"What do you have to go for?"

"Why, for mail, supplies--everything."

"Pardaloe can attend to all that."

Nan shook her head. "Whether he can or not, I'm not going to be cut off from going to Sleepy Cat, Uncle Duke--nor from seeing Henry de Spain."

"Meaning to say you won't obey, eh?"

"When I'm going to marry a man it isn't right to forbid me seeing him."

"You're not going to marry him; you're going to marry Gale, and the quicker you make up your mind to it the better."

"You might better tell me I am going to marry Bull Page--I would marry him first. I will never marry Gale Morgan in the living world, and I've told you so more than once."

He regarded his niece a moment wrathfully and, without replying, walked back to the house. Nan, upset but resolute, went on to the barn and asked Pardaloe to saddle her pony. Pardaloe shuffled around in an obliging way, but at the end of some evasion admitted he had orders not to do it. Nan flamed at the information. She disliked Pardaloe anyway, not for any reason she could a.s.sign beyond the fact that he had once been a chum of Gale's. But she was too high-spirited to dispute with him, and returned to the house pink with indignation.

Going straight to her uncle, she protested against such tyranny. Duke was insensible alike to her pleas and her threats.

But next morning Nan was up at three o'clock. She made her way into the barn before a soul was stirring, and at daybreak was well on her way to Sleepy Cat. She telephoned to de Spain's office from the hospital and went to breakfast. De Spain joined her before she had finished, and when they left the dining-room she explained why she had disappointed him the day before. He heard the story with misgivings.

"I'll tell you how it looks to me, Nan," he said when she had done.

"You are like a person that's being bound tighter every day by invisible cords. You don't see them because you are fearless. You are too fearless, Nan," he added, with apprehension reflected in the expression of his face. "I'll tell you what I wish you'd do, and I say it knowing you won't do it," he concluded.

She made light of his fears, twisting his right hand till it was helpless in her two hands and laughing at him. "How do you know I won't do it?"

"Because I've asked you before. This is it: marry me, now, here, to-day, and don't take any more chances out there."

"But, Henry," protested Nan, "I can't marry you now and just run away from poor Uncle Duke. If you will just be patient, I'll bring him around to our side."