"Henry! I didn't send any message--when did you get one?"

"Last night, in my office in Sleepy Cat, from a man that refused to give his name."

"I never sent any message to you," she insisted in growing wonderment.

"I have been locked in a room for three days, dearie. The Lord knows I wanted to send you word. Who ever telephoned a message like that? Was it a trap to get you in here?"

He told her the story--of the strenuous efforts he had made to discover the ident.i.ty of the messenger--and how he had been balked.

"No matter," said Nan, at last. "It couldn't have been a trap. It must have been a friend, surely, not an enemy."

"Or," said de Spain, bending over her as if he were afraid she might escape, and putting his face close to hers, "some mildly curious person, some idle devil, Nan, that wanted to see what two timid men would look like, mixed up in a real fight over the one girl in the mountains both are trying to marry at once."

"Henry," every time she repeated his name de Spain cared less for what should happen in the rest of the world, "what are we going to do now?

We can't stay here all night--and take what they will greet us with in the morning."

He answered her question with another: "What about trying to get out by El Capitan?"

She started in spite of herself. "I mean," he added, "just to have a look over there, Nan."

"How could you even have a look a night like this?" she asked, overcome at the thought of the dizzy cliff. "It would be certain death, Henry."

"I don't mean at the worst to try to cross it till we get a glimpse of daylight. But it's quite a way over there. I remember some good hiding-places along that trail. We may find one where I can build a little fire and dry you out. I'm more worried over you being wet all night than the rest of it. The question is, Can we find a trail up to where we want to go?"

"I know two or three," she answered, "if they are only not flooded."

The storm seemed to have pa.s.sed, but the darkness was intense, and from above the northern Superst.i.tions came low mutterings of thunder.

Compelled to strike out over the rocks to get up to any of the trails toward El Capitan, Nan, helped by de Spain when he could help, led the ascent toward the first ledge they could hope to follow on their dangerous course.

The point at which the two climbed almost five hundred feet that night up Music Mountain is still pointed out in the Gap. An upturned rock at the foot, a stunted cedar jutting from the ledge at the point they finally gained, marked the beginning and end of their effort. No person, looking at that confused wall, willingly believes it could ever have been scaled in the dead of night. Torn, bruised, and exhausted, Nan, handed up by her lover, threw herself at last prostrate on the ledge at the real beginning of their trail, and from that vantage-point they made their way along the eastern side of Music Mountain for two miles before they stopped again to rest.

It was already well after midnight. A favoring spot was seized on by de Spain for the resting-place he wanted. A dry recess beneath an overhanging wall made a shelter for the fire that he insisted on building to warm Nan in her soaked clothing. He found cedar roots in the dark and soon had a blaze going. It was dangerous, both realized, to start a fire, but they concealed the blaze as best they could and took the chance--a chance that more nearly than any that had gone before, cost them their lives. But what still lay ahead of the two justified in de Spain's mind what he was doing. He acted deliberately in risking the exposure of their position to unfriendly eyes far distant.

CHAPTER XXVII

EL CAPITAN

The mutterings above the mountains now grew rapidly louder and while the two hovered over the fire, a thunder-squall, rolling wildly down the eastern slope, burst over the Gap. Its sudden fury put aside for a time all question of moving, and Nan's face took on a grave expression as she looked in the firelight at her companion, thinking of how far such a storm might imperil their situation, how far cut off their already narrow chance of escape.

De Spain--reclining close beside her, looking into the depths of her eyes as the flickering blaze revealed them, drying himself in their warmth and light, eating and drinking of their presence on the mountainside alone with him, and pledged to him, his protection, and his fortunes against the world--apparently thought of nothing beyond the satisfaction of the moment. The wind drove the storm against the west side of the huge granite peak under which they were sheltered and gave them no present trouble in their slender recess. But Nan knew even better than her companion the fickle fury of a range storm, and understood uncomfortably well how a sudden shift might, at any moment, lay their entire path open to its fierceness. She warned de Spain they must be moving, and, freshened by the brief rest, they set out toward El Capitan.

Their trail lay along granite levels of comparatively good going and, fleeing from the squall, they had covered more than half the distance that separated them from the cliff, when a second thunder-storm, seeming to rush in from the desert, burst above their heads. Drenched with rain, they were forced to draw back under a projecting rock. In another moment the two storms, meeting in the Gap, crashed together.

Bolt upon bolt of lightning split the falling sheets of water, and thunder, exploding in their faces, stunned and deafened them.

Mountain peaks, played on by the wild light, leaped like spectres out of the black, and granite crags, searched by blazing shafts, printed themselves in ghostly flames on the retina; thunder, searching unnumbered gorges, echoed beneath the sharper crashes in one long, unending roll, and far out beyond the mountains the flooded desert tossed on a dancing screen into the glare, rippled like a madcap sea, and flashed in countless sheets of blinding facets. As if an unseen hand had touched a thousand granite springs above the Gap, every slender crevice spouted a stream that shot foaming out from the mountainsides. The sound of moving waters rose in a dull, vast roar, broken by the unseen boom of distant falls, launching huge ma.s.ses of water into caverns far below. The storm-laden wind tore and swirled among the crowded peaks, and above all the angry sky moaned and quivered in the rage of the elements.

Nan leaned within de Spain's arm. "If this keeps up," he said after some time, "our best play is to give up crossing to-night. We might hide somewhere on the mountain to-morrow, and try it toward evening."

"Yes, if we have to," she answered. But he perceived her reluctant a.s.sent. "What I am afraid of, Henry, is, if they were to find us. You know what I mean."

"Then we won't hide," he replied. "The minute we get the chance we will run for it. This is too fierce to last long."

"Oh, but it's November!" Nan reminded him apprehensively. "It's winter; that's what makes it so cold. You never can tell in November."

"It won't last all night, anyway," he answered with confidence.

Despite his a.s.surance, however, it did last all night, and it was only the lulls between the sharp squalls that enabled them to cover the trail before daylight. When they paused before El Capitan the fury of the night seemed largely to have exhausted itself, but the overcharged air hung above the mountains, trembling and moaning like a bruised and stricken thing. Lightning, playing across the inky heavens, blazed in constant sheets from end to end of the horizon. Its quivering glare turned the wild night into a kind of ghastly, uncertain day. Thunder, hoa.r.s.e with invective, and hurled mercilessly back and forth by the fitful wind, drew farther and farther into the recess of the mountains, only to launch its anger against its own imprisoned echoes. Under it all the two refugees, high on the mountainside, looked down on the flooding Gap.

Their flight was almost ended. Only the sheer cliff ahead blocked their descent to the aspen grove. De Spain himself had already crossed El Capitan once, and he had done it at night--but it was not, he was compelled to remind himself, on a night like this. It seemed now a madman's venture and, without letting himself appear to do so, he watched Nan's face as the lightning played over it, to read if he could, unsuspected, whether she still had courage for the undertaking.

She regarded him so collectedly, whether answering a question or asking one, that he marvelled at her strength and purpose. Hardly a moment pa.s.sed after they had started until the eastern sky lightened before the retreating storm, and with the first glimmer of daylight, the two were at the beginning of the narrow foothold which lay for half a mile between them and safety.

Here the El Capitan trail follows the face of the almost vertical wall which, rising two thousand feet in the air, fronts the gateway of Morgan's Gap.

They started forward, de Spain ahead. There was nothing now to hurry them unduly, and everything to invite caution. The footholds were slippery, rivulets still crossed the uncertain path, and fragments of rock that had washed down on the trail, made almost every step a new hazard. The face of El Capitan presents, midway, a sharp convex. Just where it is thrown forward in this keen angle, the trail runs out almost to a knife-edge, and the mountain is so nearly vertical that it appears to overhang the floor of the valley.

They made half the stretch of this angle with hardly a misstep, but the advance for a part of the way was a climb, and de Spain, turning once to speak to Nan, asked her for her rifle, that he might carry it with his own. What their story might have been had she given it to him, none can tell. But Nan, holding back, refused to let him relieve her. The dreaded angle which had haunted de Spain all night was safely turned on hands and knees and, as they rounded it toward the east, clouds scudding over the open desert broke and shot the light of dawn against the beetling arete.

De Spain turned in some relief to point to the coming day. As he did so a gust of wind, sweeping against the sheer wall, caught him off his guard. He regained his balance, but a stone, slipping underfoot, tipped him sidewise, and he threw himself on his knees to avoid the dizzy edge. As he fell forward he threw up his hand to save his hat, and in doing so released his rifle, which lay under his hand on the rock. Before he could recover it the rifle slipped from reach. In the next instant he heard it bouncing from rock to rock, five hundred feet below.

Greatly annoyed and humiliated, he regained his feet and spoke with a laugh to rea.s.sure Nan. Just as she answered not to worry, a little singing scream struck their ears; something splashed suddenly close at hand against the rock wall; chips scattered between them. From below, the sound of a rifle report cracked against the face of the cliff.

They were so startled, so completely amazed that they stood motionless. De Spain looked down and over the uneven floor of the Gap. The ranch-houses, spread like toys in the long perspective, lay peacefully revealed in the gray of the morning. Among the dark pine-trees he could discern Nan's own home. Striving with the utmost keenness of vision to detect where the shot had come from, de Spain could discover no sign of life around any of the houses. But in another moment the little singing scream came again, the blow of the heavy slug against the splintering rock was repeated, the distant report of the rifle followed.

"Under fire," muttered de Spain. He looked questioningly at Nan.

She herself, gazing across the dizzy depths, was searching for the danger-point. A third shot followed at a seemingly regular interval--the deliberate interval needed by a painstaking marksman working out his range and taking his time to find it. De Spain watched Nan's search anxiously. "We'd better keep moving," he said.

"Come! whoever is shooting can follow us a hundred yards either way." In front of de Spain a fourth bullet struck the rock. "Nan,"

he muttered, "I've got you into a fix. If we can't stop that fellow he is liable to stop us. Can you see anything?" he asked, waiting for her to come up.

"Henry!" She was looking straight down into the valley, and laid her hand on de Spain's shoulder. "Is there anything moving on the ridge--over there--see--just east of Sa.s.soon's ranch-house?"

De Spain, his eyes bent on the point Nan indicated, drew her forward to a dip in the trail which, to one stretched flat, afforded a slight protection. He made her lie down, and just beyond her refuge chose a point where the path, broadening a little and rising instead of sloping toward the outer edge, gave him a chance to brace himself between two rocks. Flattened there like a target in mid-air, he threw his hat down to Nan and, resting on one knee, waited for the shot that should tumble him down El Capitan or betray the man bent on killing him. Squalls of wind, sweeping into the Gap and sucked upward on the huge expanse of rock below, tossed his hair and ballooned his coat as he b.u.t.toned it. Another bullet, deliberately aimed, chipped the rock above him. Nan, agonizing in her suspense, cried out she must join him and go with him if he went. He steadied her apprehension and with a few words reminded her, as a riflewoman, what a gamble every shot at a height such as they occupied, and with such a wind, must be. He reminded her, too, it was much easier to shoot down than up, but all the time he was searching for the flash that should point the a.s.sa.s.sin. A bullet struck again viciously close between them. De Spain spoke slowly: "Give me your rifle." Without turning his head he held out his hand, keeping his eyes rigidly on the suspicious spot on the ridge. "How far is it to that road, Nan?"

She looked toward the faint line that lay in the deep shadows below.

"Three hundred yards."

"Nan, if it wasn't for you, I couldn't travel this country at all," he remarked with studious unconcern. "Last time I had no ammunition--this time, no rifle--you always have what's needed. How high are we, Nan?"

"Seven hundred feet."

"Elevate for me, Nan, will you?"

"Remember the wind," she faltered, adjusting the sight as he had asked.

With the cautioning words she pa.s.sed the burnished weapon, glittering yet with the rain-drops, into his hand. A flash came from the distant ridge. Throwing the rifle to his shoulder, de Spain covered a hardly perceptible black object on the trail midway between Sa.s.soon's ranch-house and a little bridge which he well remembered--he had crossed it the night he dragged Sa.s.soon into town. It seemed a long time that he pressed the rifle back against his shoulder and held his eye along the barrel. He was wondering as he covered the crouching man with the deadly sight which of his enemies this might be. He even slipped the rifle from his shoulder and looked long and silently at the black speck before he drew the weapon back again into place. Then he fired before Nan could believe he had lined the sights. Once, twice, three times his hand fell and rose sharply on the lever, with every mark of precision, yet so rapidly Nan could not understand how he could discover what his shots were doing.

The fire came steadily back, and deliberately, without the least intimation of being affected by de Spain's return. It was a duel shorn of every element of equality, with an a.s.sa.s.sin at one end of the range, and a man flattened half-way up the clouds against El Capitan at the other, each determined to kill the other before he should stir one more foot.

Far above, an eagle, in morning flight, soared majestically out from a jutting crag and circled again and again in front of El Capitan, while the air sang with the whining dice that two gamblers against death threw across the gulf between them. Nan, half hidden in her trough of rock, watched the great bird poise and wheel above the deadly firing, and tried to close her eyes to the figure of de Spain above her, fighting for her life and his own.