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 250 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, hoarded her responsiveness under calm 251 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 252 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 253 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 Sassoon, just the same. A little game with your 254 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 Sassoon spotted. And where do you suppose Split-lips is this minute?”

“Morgan’s Gap.”

“Quite so––and been there all the time. Now, Bob has the old warrant for him: the question is, how to get him out.”

De Spain reflected a moment before replying: “John, I’d let him alone just for the present,” he said at length.

Lefever’s eyes bulged: “Let Sassoon alone?”

“He will keep––for a while, anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to stir things up too strong over that way just at the minute, John.”

“Why not?”

De Spain shuffled a little: “Well, Jeffries thinks we might let things rest till Duke Morgan and the others get over some of their soreness.”

Lefever, astonished at the indifference of de Spain to the opportunity of nabbing Sassoon, 255 while he could be found, expostulated strongly. When de Spain persisted, Lefever, huffed, confided to Bob Scott that when the general manager got ready he could catch Sassoon himself.

De Spain wanted for Nan’s sake, as well as his own, to see what could be done to pacify her uncle and his relatives so that a wedge might be driven in between them and their notorious henchman, and Sassoon brought to book with their consent; on this point, however, he was not quite bold-faced enough to take his friends into his confidence.

De Spain, as fiery a lover as he was a fighter, stayed none of his courting because circumstances put Music Mountain between him and his mistress. And Nan, after she had once surrendered, was nothing behind in the chances she unhesitatingly took to arrange her meetings with de Spain. He found in her, once her girlish timidity was overcome and a woman’s confidence had replaced it, a disregard of consequences, so far as their own plans were concerned, that sometimes took away his breath.

The very day after she had got her uncle home, with the aid of Satterlee Morgan and an antiquated spring wagon, Nan rode, later in the afternoon, over to Calabasas. The two that would not be restrained had made their appointment 256 at the lower lava beds half-way between the Gap and Calabasas. The sun was sinking behind the mountain when de Spain galloped out of the rocks as Nan turned from the trail and rode toward the black and weather-beaten meeting-place.

They could hardly slip from their saddles fast enough to reach each other’s arms––Nan, trim as a model in fresh khaki, trying with a handkerchief hardly larger than a postage-stamp to wipe the flecks of dust from her pink cheeks, while de Spain, between dabs, covered them with importunate greetings. Looking engrossed into each other’s eyes, and both, in their eagerness, talking at once, they led their horses into hiding and sat down to try to tell all that had happened since their parting. Wars and rumors of wars, feuds and raidings, fights and pursuits were no more to them than to babes in the woods. All that mattered to them––sitting or pacing together and absorbed, in the path of the long-cold volcanic stream buried in the shifting sands of the desert––was that they should clasp each other’s clinging hands, listen each to the other’s answering voice, look unrestrained into each other’s questioning eyes.

They met in both the lava beds––the upper lay between the Gap and town––more than once. 257 And one day came a scare. They were sitting on a little ledge well up in the rocks where de Spain could overlook the trail east and west, and were talking about a bungalow some day to be in Sleepy Cat, when they saw men riding from the west toward Calabasas. There were three in the party, one lagging well behind. The two men leading, Nan and de Spain made out to be Gale Morgan and Page. They saw the man coming on behind stop his horse and lean forward, his head bent over the trail. He was examining the sand and halted quite a minute to study something. Both knew what he was studying––the hoof-prints of Nan’s pony heading toward the lava. Nan shrank back and with de Spain moved a little to where they could watch the intruder without being seen. Nan whispered first: “It’s Sassoon.” De Spain nodded. “What shall we do?” breathed Nan.

“Nothing yet,” returned her lover, watching the horseman, whose eyes were still fixed on the pony’s trail, but who was now less than a half mile away and riding straight toward them.

De Spain, his eyes on the danger and his hand laid behind Nan’s waist, led the way guardedly down to where their horses stood. Nan, needing no instructions for the emergency, took the lines of the horses, and de Spain, standing beside his 258 own horse, reached his right hand over in front of the pommel and, regarding Sassoon all the while, drew his rifle slowly from its scabbard. The blood fled Nan’s cheeks. She said nothing. Without looking at her, de Spain drew her own rifle from her horse’s side, passed it into her hand and, moving over in front of the horses, laid his left hand reassuringly on her waist again. At that moment, little knowing what eyes were on him in the black fragments ahead, Sassoon looked up. Then he rode more slowly forward. The color returned to Nan’s cheeks: “Do you want me to use this?” she murmured, indicating the rifle.

“Certainly not. But if the others turn back, I may need it. Stay right here with the horses. He will lose the trail in a minute now. When he reaches the rock I’ll go down and keep him from getting off his horse––he won’t fight from the saddle.”

But with an instinct better than knowledge, Sassoon, like a wolf scenting danger, stopped again. He scanned the broken and forbidding hump in front, now less than a quarter of a mile from him, questioningly. His eyes seemed to rove inquisitively over the lava pile as if asking why a Morgan Gap pony had visited it. In another moment he wheeled his horse and spurred rapidly after his companions.

The two drew a deep breath. De Spain laughed: “What we don’t know, never hurts us.” He drew Nan to him. Holding the rifle muzzle at arm’s length as the butt rested on the ground, she looked up from the shoulder to which she was drawn: “What should you have done if he had come?”

“Taken you to the Gap and then taken him to Sleepy Cat, where he belongs.”

“But, Henry, suppose–––”

“There wouldn’t have been any ‘suppose.’”

“Suppose the others had come.”

“With one rifle, here, a man could stand off a regiment. Nan, do you know, you fit into my arm as if you were made for it?”

His courage was contagious. When he had tired her with fresh importunities he unpinned her felt hat and held it out of reach while he kissed and toyed with and disarranged her hair. In revenge, she snatched from his pocket his little black memorandum-book and some letters and read, or pretended to read them, and seizing her opportunity she broke from him and ran with the utmost fleetness up into the rocks.

In two minutes they had forgotten the episode almost as completely as if it never had been. But when they left for home, they agreed they would not meet there again. They knew that 260 Sassoon, like a jackal, would surely come back, and more than once, until he found out just what that trail or any subsequent trail leading into the beds meant. The lovers laughed the jackal’s spying to scorn and rode away, bantering, racing, and chasing each other in the saddle, as solely concerned in their happiness as if there were nothing else of moment in the whole wide world.