When within an hour de Spain joined Nan, tense with suspense and anxiety, at the hospital, she tried hard to read his news in his face.

“Have you seen him?” she asked eagerly. De Spain nodded. “What does he say?”

“Nothing very reasonable.”

Her face fell. “I knew he wouldn’t. Tell me all about it, Henry––everything.”

She listened keenly to each word. De Spain gave her a pretty accurate recital of the interview, and Nan’s apprehension grew with her hearing of it.

“I knew it,” she repeated with conviction. “I know him better than you know him. What shall we do?”

De Spain took both her hands. He held them against his breast and stood looking into her eyes. When he regarded her in such a way her doubts and fears seemed mean and trivial. He spoke only one word, but there was a world of confidence in his tone: “Stick.”

She arched her brows as she returned his gaze, and with a little troubled laugh drew closer. “Stick, Nan,” he repeated. “It will come out all right.”

She paused a moment. “How can you know?”

“I know because it’s got to. I talked it all over with my best friend in Medicine Bend, the other day.”

“Who, Henry?”

“Whispering Smith. He laughed at your uncle’s opposing us. He said if your uncle only knew it, it’s the best thing that could happen for him. And he said if all the marriages opposed by old folks had been stopped, there wouldn’t be young folks enough left to milk the cows.”

“Henry, what is this report about the Calabasas barns burning?”

“The old Number One barn is gone and some of the old stages. We didn’t lose any horses, and the other barns are all right. Some of our Calabasas or Gap friends, probably. No matter, we’ll get them all rounded up after a while, Nan. Then, some fine day, we’re going to get married.”

De Spain rode that night to Calabasas to look into the story of the fire.

McAlpin, swathed in bandages, made no bones about accusing the common enemy. No witnesses could be found to throw any more light on 290 the inquiry than the barn boss himself. And de Spain made only a pretense of a formal investigation. If he had had any doubts about the origin of the fire they would have been resolved by an anonymous scrawl, sent through the mail, promising more if he didn’t get out of the country.

But instead of getting out of the country, de Spain continued as a matter of energetic policy to get into it. He rode the deserts stripped, so to say, for action and walked the streets of Sleepy Cat welcoming every chance to meet men from Music Mountain or the Sinks. 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. Sassoon was in his company a great deal, and Nan knew of old that Sassoon 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 291 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 masses 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 292 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 293 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 amusement and tried to pass the 295 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 297 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 assign 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.”

“Never, Nan.”

“Don’t be so sure. I know him better than you do, and when he comes for anybody, he comes all at once. Why, it’s funny, Henry. Now that I’m picking up courage, you’re losing it!”

He shook his head. “I don’t like the way things are going.”

“Dearie,” she urged, “should I be any safer at home if I were your wife, than I am as your sweetheart. I don’t want to start a horrible family war by running away, and that is just what I certainly should do.”

De Spain was unconvinced. But apprehension is short-lived in young hearts. The sun shone, the sky spread a speckless blue over desert and mountain, the day was for them together. They did not promise all of it to themselves at once––they 299 filched its sweetness bit by bit, moment by moment, and hour by hour, declaring to each other they must part, and dulling the pain of parting with the anodyne of procrastination. Thus, the whole day went to their castles and dreams. In a retired corner of the cool dining-room at the Mountain House, they lingered together over a long-drawn-out dinner. The better-informed guests by asides indicated their presence to others. They described them as the hardy couple who had first met in a stiff Frontier Day rifle match, which the girl had won. Her defeated rival––the man now most regarded and feared in the mountain country––was the man with the reticent mouth, mild eyes, curious birthmark, and with the two little, perplexed wrinkles visible most of the time just between his dark eyebrows, the man listening intently to every syllable that fell from the lips of the trimly bloused, active girl opposite him, leaning forward in her eagerness to tell him things. Her jacket hung over the back of her chair, and she herself was referred to by the more fanciful as queen of the outlaw camp at Music Mountain.

They two were seen together that day about town by many, for the story of their courtship was still veiled in mystery and afforded ground for the widest speculation, while that of their difficulties, and such particulars as de Spain’s 300 fruitless efforts to conciliate Duke Morgan and Duke’s open threats against de Spain’s life were widely known. All these details made the movement and the fate of the young couple the object of keenly curious comment.

In the late afternoon the two rode almost the whole length of Main Street together on their way to the river bridge. Every one knew the horseflesh they bestrode––none cleaner-limbed, hardier, or faster in the high country. Those that watched them amble slowly past, laughing and talking, intent only on each other, erect, poised, and motionless, as if moulded to their saddles, often spoke of having seen Nan and her lover that day. It was a long time before they were seen riding down Main Street together again.