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 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 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.
CHAPTER XXIII
DE SPAIN WORRIES
They parted that evening under the shadow of Music Mountain. Nan believed she could at least win her Uncle Duke over from any effort of Gale’s to coerce her. Her influence over her uncle had never yet failed, and she was firm in the conviction she could gain him to her side, since he had everything to win and nothing to lose by siding against Gale, whom he disliked and distrusted, anyway.
For de Spain there was manifestly nothing to do but doubtfully to let Nan try out her influence. They agreed to meet in Calabasas just as soon as Nan could get away. She hoped, she told him, to bring good news. De Spain arranged his business to wait at Calabasas for her, and was there, after two days, doing little but waiting and listening to McAlpin’s stories about the fire and surmises as to strange men that lurked in and about the place. But de Spain, knowing Jeffries was making an independent investigation into the affair, gave no heed to McAlpin’s suspicions.
To get away from the barn boss, de Spain took refuge in riding. The season was drawing on toward winter, and rain clouds drifting at intervals down from the mountains made the saddle a less dependable escape from the monotony of Calabasas. Several days passed with no sight of Nan and no word from her. De Spain, as the hours and days went by, scanned the horizon with increasing solicitude. When he woke on the sixth morning, he was resolved to send a scout into the Gap to learn what he could of the situation. The long silence, de Spain knew, portended nothing good. And the vexing feature of his predicament was that he had at hand no trustworthy spy to despatch for information; to secure one would be a matter of delay. He was schooled, however, to making use of such material as he had at hand, and when he had made up his mind, he sent to the stable for Bull Page.
The shambling barn man, summoned gruffly by McAlpin, hesitated as he appeared at the office door and seemed to regard the situation with suspicion. He looked at de Spain tentatively, as if ready either for the discharge with which he was daily threatened or for a renewal of his earlier, friendly relations with the man who had been queer enough to make a place for him. De Spain set Bull down before him in the stuffy little office.
“Bull,” he began with apparent frankness, “I want to know how you like your job.”
Wiping his mouth guardedly with his hand to play for time and as an introduction to a carefully worded reply, Bull parried. “Mr. de Spain, I want to ask you just one fair question.”
“Go ahead, Bull.”
Bull plunged promptly into the suspicion uppermost in his mind. “Has that slat-eyed, flat-headed, sun-sapped sneak of a Scotchman been complaining of my work? That, Mr. de Spain,” emphasized Bull, leaning forward, “is what I want to know first–is it a fair question?”
“Bull,” returned de Spain with corresponding and ceremonial emphasis, “it is a fair question between man and man. I admit it; it is a fair question. And I answer, no, Bull. McAlpin has had nothing on the face of the desert to do with my sending for you. And I add this because I know you want to hear it: he says he couldn’t complain of your work, because you never do any.”
“That man,” persisted Bull, reinforced by the hearty tone and not clearly catching the drift of the very last words, “drinks more liquor than I do.”
“He must be some tank, Bull.”
“And I don’t hide it, Mr. de Spain.”
“You’d have to crawl under Music Mountain to do that. What I want to know is, do you like your job?”
On this point it was impossible to get an expression from Bull. He felt convinced that de Spain was pressing for an answer only as a preliminary to his discharge. “No matter,” interposed the latter, cutting Bull’s ramblings short, “drop it, Bull. I want you to do something for me, and I’ll pay for it.”
Bull, with a palsied smile and a deep, quavering note of gratitude, put up his shaky hand. “Say what. That’s all. I’ve been paid.”
“You know you’re a sot, Bull.”
Bull nodded. “I know it.”
“A disgrace to the Maker whose image you were made in.”
Bull started, but seemed, on reflection, to consider this a point on which he need not commit himself.
“Still, I believe there’s a man in you yet. Something, at any rate, you couldn’t completely kill with whiskey, Bull–what?”
Bull lifted his weak and watery eyes. His whiskey-seamed face brightened into the ghost of a smile. “What I’m going to ask you to do,” continued de Spain, “is a man’s job. You can get into the Gap without trouble. You are the only man I can put my hand on just now, that can. I want you to ride over this morning and hang out around Duke Morgan’s place till you can get a chance to see Miss Nan–”
At the mention of her name, Bull shook his head a moment in affirmative approval. “She’s a queen!” he exclaimed with admiring but pungent expletives. “A queen!”
“I think so, Bull. But she is in troublesome circumstances. You know Nan and I–”
Bull winked in many ways.
“And her Uncle Duke is making us trouble, Bull. I want you to find her, speak with her, and bring word to me as to what the situation is. That doesn’t mean you’re to get drunk over there–in fact, I don’t think anybody over there would give you a drink–”
“Don’t believe they would.”
“And you are to ride back here with what you can find out just as quick, after you get into the clear, as a horse will bring you.”
Bull passed his hand over his mouth with a show of resolution. It indicated that he was pulling himself together. Within half an hour he was on his way to the Gap.
For de Spain hours never dragged as did the hours between his starting and the setting of the sun that night without his return. And the sun set behind Music Mountain in a drift of heavy clouds that brought rain. All evening it fell steadily. At eleven o’clock de Spain had given up hope of seeing his emissary before morning and was sitting alone before the stove in the office when he heard the sound of hoofs. In another moment Bull Page stood at the door.
He was a sorry sight. Soaked to the skin by the steady downpour; rain dripping intermittently from his frayed hat, his ragged beard, and tattered coat; shaking with the cold as if gripped by an ague, Bull, picking his staggering steps to the fire, and sinking in a heap into a chair, symbolized the uttermost tribute of manhood to the ravages of whiskey. He was not drunk. He had not even been drinking; but his vitality was gone. He tried to speak. It was impossible. His tongue would not frame words, nor his throat utter them. He could only look helplessly at de Spain as de Spain hastily made him stand up on his shaking knees, threw a big blanket around him, sat him down, kicked open the stove drafts, and called to McAlpin for more whiskey to steady the wreck of it crouching over the fire.
McAlpin after considerable and reluctant search produced a bottle, and unwilling, for more reasons than one, to trust it to Bull’s uncertain possession, brought a dipper. Bull held the dipper while de Spain poured. McAlpin, behind the stove, hopped first on one foot and then on the other as de Spain recklessly continued to pour. When the liquor half filled the cup, McAlpin put out unmistakable distress signals, but Bull, watching the brown stream, his eyes galvanized at the sight, held fast to the handle and made no sign to stop. “Bull!” thundered the barn boss with an emphatic word. “That is Elpaso’s bottle. What are you dreaming of, man? Mr. de Spain, you’ll kill him. Don’t ye see he can’t tell ye to stop?”
Bull, with the last flickering spark of vitality still left within him, looked steadily up and winked at de Spain. McAlpin, outraged, stamped out of the room. Steadying the dipper in both hands, Bull with an effort passed one hand at the final moment preliminarily over his mouth, and, raising the bowl, emptied it. The poison electrified him into utterance. “I seen her,” he declared, holding his chin well down and in, and speaking in a pardonably proud throat.
“Good, Bull!”
“They’ve got things tied up for fair over there.” He spoke slowly and brokenly. “I never got inside the house till after supper. Toward night I helped Pardaloe put up the stock. He let me into the kitchen after my coaxing for a cup of coffee–he’s an ornery, cold-blooded guy, that Pardaloe. Old Duke and Sassoon think the sun rises and sets on the top of his head–funny, ain’t it?”
De Spain made no comment. “Whilst I was drinking my coffee–”
“Who gave it to you?”
“Old Bunny, the Mex. Pardaloe goes out to the bunk-house; I sits down to my supper, alone, with Bunny at the stove. All of a sudden who comes a-trippin’ in from the front of the house but Nan. I jumped up as strong as I could, but I was too cold and stiff to jump up real strong. She seen me, but didn’t pay no attention. I dropped my spoon on the floor. It didn’t do no good, neither, so I pushed a hot plate of ham gravy off the table. It hit the dog ’n’ he jumped like kingdom come. Old Bunny sails into me, Nan a-watchin’, and while Mex was pickin’ up and cleanin’ up, I sneaks over to the stove and winks at Nan. Say, you oughter seen her look mad at me. She was hot, but I kept a-winkin’ and I says to her kind of husky-like: ‘Got any letters for Calabasas to-night?’ Say, she looked at me as if she’d bore holes into me, but I stood right up and glared back at the little girl. ‘Come from there this mornin’,’ says I, low, ‘going back to-night. Some one waiting there for news.’
“By jing! Just as I got the words out o’ my mouth who comes a-stalking in but Gale Morgan. The minute he seen me, he lit on me to beat the band–called me everything he could lay his tongue to. I let on I was drunk, but that didn’t help. He ordered me off the premises. ’N’ the worst of it was, Nan chimed right in and began to scold Bunny for lettin’ me in–and leaves the room, quick-like. Bunny put it on Pardaloe, and she and Gale had it, and b’jing, Gale put me out–said he’d pepper me. But wait till I tell y’ how she fooled him. It was rainin’ like hell, ’n’ it looked as if I was booked for a ride through it and hadn’t half drunk my second cup of coffee at that. I starts for the barn, when some one in the dark on the porch grabs my arm, spins me around like a top, throws a flasher up into my face, and there was Nan. ‘Bull,’ she says, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t want to see you ride out in this with nothing to eat; come this way quick.’
“She took me down cellar from the outside, under the kitchen. When Gale goes out again she flings up the trap-door, speaks to Mex, pulls all the kitchen shades down, locks the doors, and I sets down on the trap-door steps ’n’ eats a pipin’ hot supper; say! Well, I reckon I drank a couple o’ quarts of coffee. ‘Bull,’ she says, ‘I never done you no harm, did I?’ ‘Never,’ says I, ‘and I never done you none, neither, did I? And what’s more, I never will do you none.’ Then I up and told her. ‘Tell him,’ says she, ‘I can’t get hold of a horse, nor a pen, nor a piece of paper–I can’t leave the house but what I am watched every minute. They keep track of me day and night. Tell him,’ she says, ‘I can protect myself; they think they’ll break me–make me do what they want me to–marry–but they can’t break me, and I’ll never do it–tell him that.’
“‘But,’ says I, ‘that ain’t the whole case, Miss Nan. What he’ll ask me, when he’s borin’ through me with his eyes like the way you’re borin’ me through with yours, is: When will you see him–when will he see you?’
“She looked worrit for a minit. Then she looks around, grabs up the cover of an empty ’bacco box and a fork and begins a-writing inside.” Bull, with as much of a smile as he could call into life from his broken nerves, opened up his blanket, drew carefully from an inside coat pocket an oilskin package, unwrapped from it the flat, square top of a tin tobacco box on which Nan had scratched a message, and handed it triumphantly to de Spain.
He read her words eagerly:
“Wait; don’t have trouble. I can stand anything better than bloodshed, Henry. Be patient.”
While de Spain, standing close to the lantern, deciphered the brief note, Bull, wrapping his blanket about him with the air of one whose responsibility is well ended, held out his hands toward the blazing stove. De Spain went over the words one by one, and the letters again and again. It was, after all their months of ardent meetings, the first written message he had ever had from Nan. He flamed angrily at the news that she was prisoner in her own home. But there was much to weigh in her etched words, much to think about concerning her feelings–not alone concerning his own.
He dropped into his chair and, oblivious for a moment of his companion’s presence, stared into the fire. When he started from his revery Bull was asleep. De Spain picked him up, carried him in his blanket over to a cot, cut the wet rags off him, and, rolling him in a second blanket, walked out into the barn and ordered up a team and light wagon for Sleepy Cat. The rain fell all night.
CHAPTER XXIV
AN OMINOUS MESSAGE
Few men bear suspense well; de Spain took his turn at it very hard. For the first time in his life he found himself braved by men of a type whose defiance he despised–whose lawlessness he ordinarily warred on without compunction–but himself without the freedom that had always been his to act. Every impulse to take the bit in his teeth was met with the same insurmountable obstacle–Nan’s feelings–and the unpleasant possibility that might involve him in bloodshed with her kinspeople.
“Patience.” He repeated the word to himself a thousand times to deaden his suspense and apprehension. Business affairs took much of his time, but Nan’s situation took most of his thought. For the first time he told John Lefever the story of Nan’s finding him on Music Mountain, of her aid in his escape, and the sequel of their friendship. Lefever gave it to Bob Scott in Jeffries’s office.
“What did I tell you, John?” demanded Bob mildly.
“No matter what you told me,” retorted Lefever. “The question is: What’s he to do to get Nan away from there without shooting up the Morgans?”
De Spain had gone that morning to Medicine Bend. He got back late and, after a supper at the Mountain House, went directly to his room.
The telephone-bell was ringing when he unlocked and threw open his door. Entering the room, he turned on a light, closed the door behind him, and sat down to answer the call.
“Is this Henry de Spain?” came a voice, slowly pronouncing the words over the wire.
“Yes.”
“I have a message for you.”
“What is it?”
“From Music Mountain.”
“Go ahead.”
“The message is like this: ‘Take me away from here as soon as you can.’”
“Whom is that message from?”
“I can’t call any names.”
“Who are you?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I say. Good-by.”
“Hold on. Where are you talking from?”
“About a block from your office.”
“Do you think it a fair way to treat a man to–”
“I have to be fair to myself.”
“Give me the message again.”
“‘Take me away from here as soon as you can.’”
“Where does it come from?”
“Music Mountain.”
“If you’re treating me fair–and I believe you mean to–come over to my room a minute.”
“No.”
“Let me come to where you are?”
“No.”
“Let me wait for you–anywhere?”
“No.”
“Do you know me?”
“By sight.”
“How did you know I was in town to-night?”
“I saw you get off the train.”
“You were looking for me, then?”
“To deliver my message.”
“Do you think that message means what it says?”
“I know it does.”
“Do you know what it means for me to undertake?”
“I have a pretty stiff idea.”
“Did you get it direct from the party who sent it?”
“I can’t talk all night. Take it or leave it just where it is.”
De Spain heard him close. He closed his own instrument and began feverishly signalling central. “This is 101. Henry de Spain talking,” he said briskly. “You just called me. Ten dollars for you, operator, if you can locate that call, quick!”
There was a moment of delay at the central office, then the answer: “It came from 234–Tenison’s saloon.”
“Give me your name, operator. Good. Now give me 22 as quick as the Lord will let you, and ring the neck off the bell.”
Lefever answered the call on number 22. The talk was quick and sharp. Messengers were instantly pressed into service from the despatcher’s office. Telephone wires hummed, and every man available on the special agent’s force was brought into action. Livery-stables were covered, the public resorts were put under observation, horsemen clattered up and down the street. Within an incredibly short time the town was rounded up, every outgoing trail watched, and search was under way for any one from Morgan’s Gap, and especially for the sender of the telephone message.
De Spain, after instructing Lefever, hastened to Tenison’s. His rapid questioning of the few habitués of the place and the bartender elicited only the information that a man had used the telephone booth within a few minutes. Nobody knew him or, if they did know him, refused to describe him in any but vague terms. He had come in by the front door and slipped out probably by the rear door–at all events, unnoticed by those questioned. By a series of eliminating inquiries, de Spain made out only that the man was not a Morgan. Outside, Bob Scott in the saddle waited with a led horse. The two men rode straight and hard for the river bridge. They roused an old hunter who lived in a near-by hut, on the town side, and asked whether any horseman had crossed the bridge. The hunter admitted gruffly that he had heard a horse’s hoof recently on the bridge. Within how long? The hunter, after taking a full precious minute to decide, said thirty minutes; moreover, he insisted that the horseman he had heard had ridden into town, and not out.
Sceptical of the correctness of the information, Scott and de Spain clattered out on the Sinks. Their horseflesh was good and they felt they could overtake any man not suspecting pursuit. The sky was overcast, and speed was their only resource. After two miles of riding, the pursuers reined up on a ridge, and Scott, springing from the saddle, listened for sounds. He rose from the ground, declaring he could hear the strides of a running horse. Again the two dashed ahead.
The chase was bootless. Whoever rode before them easily eluded pursuit. The next time the scout dropped from his saddle to listen, not the faintest sound rewarded his attention. De Spain was impatient. “He could easily slip us,” Scott explained, “by leaving the trail for a minute while we rode past–if he knows his business–and I guess he does.”
“If the old man was right, that man could have ridden in town and out, too, within half to three-quarters of an hour,” said de Spain. “But how could he have got out without being heard?”
“Maybe,” suggested Scott, “he forded the river.”
“Could he do it?”
“It’s a man’s job,” returned Scott, reflecting, “but it could be done.”
“If a man thought it necessary.”
“If he knew you by sight,” responded Scott unmoved, “he might have thought it necessary.”
Undeterred by his failure to overtake the fugitive, de Spain rode rapidly back to town to look for other clews. Nothing further was found to throw light on the message or messenger. No one had been found anywhere in town from Morgan’s Gap; whoever had taken a chance in delivering the message had escaped undetected.
Even after the search had been abandoned the significance of the incident remained to be weighed. De Spain was much upset. A conference with Scott, whose judgment in any affair was marked by good sense, and with Lefever, who, like a woman, reached by intuition a conclusion at which Scott or de Spain arrived by process of thought, only revealed the fact that all three, as Lefever confessed, were nonplussed.
“It’s one of two things,” declared Lefever, whose eyes were never dulled by late hours. “Either they’ve sent this to lure you into the Gap and ‘get’ you, or else–and that’s a great big ‘or else’–she needs you. Henry, did that message–I mean the way it was worded–sound like Nan Morgan?”
De Spain could hardly answer. “It did, and it didn’t,” he said finally. “But–” his companions saw during the pause by which his lips expressed the resolve he had finally reached that he was not likely to be turned from it–“I am going to act just as if the word came from Nan and she does need me.”
More than one scheme for getting quickly into touch with Nan was proposed and rejected within the next ten minutes. And when Lefever, after conferring with Scott, put up to de Spain a proposal that the three should ride into the Gap together and demand Nan at the hands of Duke Morgan, de Spain had reached another conclusion.
“I know you are willing to take more than your share, John, of any game I play. In the first place it isn’t right to take you and Bob in where I am going on my own personal affair. And I know Nan wouldn’t enjoy the prospect of an all-around fight on her account. Fighting is a horror to that girl. I’ve got her feelings to think about as well as my own. I’ve decided what to do, John. I’m going in alone.”
“You’re going in alone!”
“To-night. Now, I’ll tell you what I’d like you to do if you want to: ride with me and wait till morning, outside El Capitan. If you don’t hear from me by ten o’clock, ride back to Calabasas and notify Jeffries to look for a new manager.”
“On the contrary, if we don’t hear from you by ten o’clock, Henry, we will blaze our way in and drag out your body.” Lefever put up his hand to cut off any rejoinder. “Don’t discuss it. What happens after ten o’clock to-morrow morning, if we don’t hear from you before that, can’t possibly be of any interest to you or make any difference.” He paused, but de Spain saw that he was not done. When he resumed, he spoke in a tone different from that which de Spain usually associated with him. “Henry, when I was a youngster and going to Sunday-school, my old Aunt Lou often told me a story about a pitcher that used to go to the well. And she told me it went many, many times, safe and sound; but my Aunt Lou told me, further, the pitcher got so used to going to the well safe and sound that it finally went once too many times, just once too often, and got smashed all to hell. Aunt Lou didn’t say it exactly in that way–but such was the substance of the moral.
“You’ve pulled a good many tough games in this country, Henry. No man knows better than I that you never pulled one for the looks of the thing or to make people talk–or that you ever took a chance you didn’t feel you had to take. But, it isn’t humanly possible you can keep this up for all time; it can’t go on forever. The pitcher goes to the well once too often, Henry; there comes a time when it doesn’t come back.
“Understand–I’m not saying this to attempt to dissuade you from the worst job you ever started in on. I know your mind is made up. You won’t listen to me; you won’t listen to Scott; and I’m too good an Indian not to know where I get off, or not to do what I’m told. But this is what I have been thinking of a long, long time; and this is what I feel I ought to say, here and now.”
The two men were sitting in de Spain’s room. De Spain was staring through the broad south window at the white-capped peaks of the distant range. He was silent for a time. “I believe you’re right, John,” he said after a while. “I know you are. In this case I am tied up more than I’ve ever been tied before; but I’ve got to see it through as best I can, and take what comes without whining. My mind is made up and, strange as it may sound to you, I feel that I am coming back. Not but what I know it’s due me, John. Not but what I expect to get it sometime. And maybe I’m wrong now; but I don’t feel as if it’s coming till I’ve given all the protection to that girl that a man can give to a woman.”