The prospect of reducing the Sinks to a law-and-order basis at his own proper risk could not be alluring to the most aggressive of law-and-order men–and de Spain was not aggressive. Yet within a moment of his sensible decision he was to be hurried by a mere accident to an exactly contrary fate.
As he passed Grant Street again he encountered a party on horseback heading for the river bridge. Trotting their horses leisurely, they turned the corner directly in front of de Spain. There were five in the company. Three of the men were riding abreast and a little ahead. Of these, the middle horseman was a spare man of forty years, with a black military hat, and a frankly disreputable air. His face was drawn up into a one-sided smile, marked by a deep, vertical wrinkle running up, close to his nose, from the corner of his mouth almost to the inner corner of his eye. Satt Morgan’s smile was habitual and lessened his stern aspect. At his right rode his cousin, Duke Morgan, older, shorter, and stouter. His square, heavy-jawed, smooth-shaven face was lighted by hard, keen eyes, and finished by an uncompromising chin. Duke was the real head of the clan, of which there were numerous branches in the Superstition Mountains, all looking with friendliness or enmity to the Morgans of Morgan’s Gap.
The yellow-haired man riding on the left, with a red face and red-lidded, squinting eyes, was in stature something between the two Morgans, and about the age of the elder cousin. His shoulders slouched, and he showed none of the blood of his companions. But this man, David Sassoon, the Calabasas gambler, quondam cowboy, and chronic brawler, stood in some way close to the different Morgans, and was reputed to have got each of them, at different times, out of more than one troublesome affair, either by sheer force of arms, or through his resourceful cunning.
These men were followed by a younger man riding with a very young woman. De Spain knew none of the front-rank men, but he knew well Nan Morgan and her dancing partner.
They were talking together, and Nan seemed from her manner at odds with her companion. He appeared to be trying to laugh the situation off when he caught sight of de Spain pausing for them to pass. Gale’s face lighted as he set eyes on him, and he spoke quickly to Nan. De Spain could not at first hear his words, but he needed no ears to interpret his laugh and the expression on his face. Nan, persistently importuned, looked around. She saw de Spain, much closer, it would seem, than she had expected to see a man looking directly at her, and her eyes rested on him only a moment. The substance of her cousin’s words she apparently had not caught, and he repeated them in a louder voice: “There’s your handsome Medicine Bend gunman!”
Nan, glancing again toward de Spain, seemed aware that he heard. She looked away. De Spain tightened up with a rage. The blood rushed to his face, the sarcasm struck in. If the birthmark could have deepened with humiliation it would have done so at the instant of the cold inspection of the girl’s pretty eyes. But he cared less for Nan’s inspection, cold as it was, than for the jibe of her satisfied cousin. Not content, Gale, calling ahead to the others, invited their attention to the man on the street corner. De Spain felt minded to hurl an insult at them in a body. It would have been four to one–rather awkward odds even if they were mounted–and there was a woman. But he only stood still, returning their inspection as insolently as silence could. Each face was faithfully photographed and filed in his memory, and his steady gaze followed them until they rode down the hill and clattered jauntily out on the swaying suspension bridge that still crosses the Rat River at Grant Street, and connects the whole south country–the Spanish Sinks, the Thief River gold-fields, the saw-toothed Superstition Range, Morgan’s Gap, and Music Mountain with Sleepy Cat and the railroad.
De Spain, walking down Grant Street, watched the party disappear among the hills across the river. The encounter had stirred him. He already hated the Morgans, at least all except the blue-eyed girl, and she, it was not difficult to divine from her expression, was, at least, disdainful of her morning rival.
Reaching the station platform while still busy with his thoughts, de Spain encountered Jeffries and Lefever.
“When are you coming up to take my job, Henry?” demanded the superintendent without any parley.
“I am not coming up,” announced de Spain bluntly.
“Not coming up, eh? All right, we’ll find somebody that will come up,” retorted Jeffries. “John,” he added, “wire Medicine Bend to send Farrell Kennedy here in the morning to see me.”
“What’s the reason that fellow sticks so close to Medicine Bend?” demanded Jeffries, when Lefever joined him later in his office.
“Don’t ask me,” frowned Lefever perplexed. “Don’t ask me. Henry is odd in some ways. You can’t tell what’s going on inside that fellow’s head by looking at the outside of it.” Jeffries grunted coldly at this bit of wisdom. “I’ll tell you what I should think–if I had to think: Henry de Spain has never found out rightly who was responsible for the death of his father. He expects to do it, sometime; and he thinks sometime he’s going to find out right there in Medicine Bend.”
While they were talking the train was pulling out for Medicine Bend with de Spain on board.
It was a tedious ride, and de Spain was much too engaged with his thoughts to sleep. The Morgans were in his head, and he could not be rid of them. He recalled having been told that long ago some of these same Morgans lived on the Peace River above his father’s ranch. Every story he had ever heard of their wild lives, for they were men sudden in quarrel and reckless of sequel, came back to his mind. He wondered what sort of a young girl this could be who lived among them–who could live among them–and be what she seemed at a glance to be–a fawn among mountain-wolves.
It was late when he reached Medicine Bend, and raining–a dismal kind of a night. Instead of going to his room, just across the street from the station, he went up-stairs and sat down with the train-despatchers. After an hour of indecision, marked by alternative fits of making up and unmaking his mind, he went, instead of going to bed, into the telegraph-room, where black-haired Dick Grady sat at a key.
“How about the fight to-night at Sleepy Cat?” Grady asked at once.
“What fight?” demanded de Spain perfunctorily.
“The Calabasas gang got to going again up there to-night. They say one of the Morgans was in it. Some town, that Sleepy Cat, eh, Henry?”
“What Morgan was in it?”
“Gale Morgan. A lot of stuff came in on it an hour ago. Was there anything started when you left?”
“I didn’t hear of anything,” responded de Spain. But his indifference to the subject was marked.
“What’s the matter?” demanded the operator. “Aren’t you well to-night?”
“Perfectly.”
“Sleepy?”
De Spain roused himself. “Dick, have you got a Sleepy Cat wire open?”
“What do you want?”
“Tell Jeffries I’ll take that Thief River stage job.”
CHAPTER III
THE SPANISH SINKS
From a car window at Sleepy Cat may be seen, stretching far down into the southwest a chain of towering peaks, usually snow-clad, that dominate the desert in every direction for almost a hundred miles. In two extended groups, separated by a narrow but well-defined break, they constitute a magnificent rampart, named by Spaniards the Superstition Mountains, and they stretch beyond the horizon to the south, along the vast depression known locally as the Spanish Sinks. The break on the eastern side of the chain comes about twenty miles southwest of Sleepy Cat, and is marked on the north by the most striking, and in some respects most majestic peak in the range–Music Mountain; the break itself has taken the name of its earliest white settlers, and is called Morgan’s Gap. No railroad has ever yet penetrated this southern country, despite the fact that rich mines have been opened along these mountains, and are still being opened; but it lies to-day in much of the condition of primitive savagery, and lawlessness, as the word is conventionally accepted, that obtained when the first rush was made for the Thief River gold-fields.
It is not to be understood that law is an unknown equation between Calabasas and Thief River, or even between Calabasas and Sleepy Cat. But as statute law it suffers so many infractions as to be hardly recognizable in the ordinary sense. Business is done in this country; but business must halt everywhere with its means of communication, and in the Music Mountain country it still rests on the facilities of a stage line. The stage line is a big and vigorous affair, a perfectly organized railroad adjunct with the best horses, the best wagons, the best freighting outfits that money can supply.
But this is by no means, in its civilizing effect, a railroad. A railroad drives lawlessness before it–the Music Mountain country still leans on stage-line law. The bullion wagons still travel the difficult roads. They look for safety to their armed horsemen; the four and six horse stages look to the armed guard, the wayfarer must look to his horse–and it should be a good one; the mountain rancher to his rifle, the cattle thief to the moonless night, the bandit to his wits, the gunman to his holster: these include practically all of the people that travel the Spanish Sinks, except the Morgans and the Mormons. The Mormons looked to the Morgans for safety; the Morgans to themselves.
For many a year the Morgans have been almost overlords of the Music Mountain country. They own, or have laid claim to, an extended territory in the mountains, a Spanish grant. One of the first mountain Morgans married a Spanish girl, and during the early days, when the Morgans were not fighting some one out of court, they were fighting some one in court on their endless and involved titles.
But whether they won domain in lawsuit or lost it, one pearl of their holdings they never submitted to the jurisdiction of any tribunal other than their own arms. Morgan’s Gap opens south of Music Mountain, less than ten miles west of Calabasas. It is a narrow valley where valleys are more precious than water–for the mountain valley means water–and this in a country where water is much more precious than life. And some of the best of this land at the foot of Music Mountain was the maternal inheritance of Nan Morgan.
At Calabasas the Thief River stage line maintains completely equipped relay barns. They are over twenty miles from Sleepy Cat, but nearly fifty the other way from Thief River. The unequal division is not due to what was desirable when the route was laid out, but to the limit of what man could do in the never-conquered desert. This supplies at Calabasas a spring, to tempt the unwary traveller still farther within its clutches. A large number of horses are kept at Calabasas, and the barn crews are quartered there in a company barrack. Along the low ridges and in the shallow depressions about Calabasas Spring there are a very few widely separated shacks, once built by freighters and occupied by squatter outlaws to be within reach of water. This gives the vicinity something of the appearance of a poorly sustained prairie-dog town. And except these shacks, there is nothing between Calabasas, Thief River, and the mountains except sunshine and alkali. I say nothing, meaning especially nothing, in the way of a human habitation.
But there is a queer inn at Calabasas. A pioneer Thief River prospector, mad with thirst, fought his way across the Sinks to the Calabasas Spring, and wandered thence one day into Sleepy Cat. In a delirium of gratitude he ordered built at Calabasas what he termed a hotel, to provide at that forbidden oasis for the luxurious comfort of future thirst-mad wanderers. It was built of lumber hauled a thousand miles, and equipped with luxuries brought three thousand–a fearsome, rambling structure, big enough for all the prospectors in the Rocky Mountains.
Having built this monument, creditable to his good-will rather than his good sense, the unfortunate man went really mad, and had the sorry distinction of being the first person to be put in the insane asylum at Bear Dance. It had never occurred to him that any one had any title to, or that any madder man would lay any claim to, so accursed a spot as Calabasas. But old Duke Morgan announced in due time that the hotel was built on Morgan land, and belonged to the Morgans. Nobody outside a madhouse could be found to dispute with Duke Morgan a title to land within ten miles of Morgan’s Gap, and none but a lunatic would attempt to run a hotel at Calabasas, anyway. However, a solution of the difficulty was found: Duke’s colorable title gave the cue to his retainers in the Gap, and in time they carted away piecemeal most of the main building, leaving for years the kitchen and the servants’ quarters adjoining it to owls, lizards, scorpions, and spiders.
Meantime, to tap the fast-developing gold-fields, the freight route and stages had been put in, and the barns built at Calabasas. A need naturally developed for at least one feature of a hotel–a barroom. A newer lunatic answered the call of civilization–a man only mildly insane stocked the kitchen range with liquors, and fitted up in a crude way the ice-boxes–where there never was ice–serving pantries, and other odd nooks for sleeping quarters. Here the thirsty stage passenger, little suspecting the origin of the facilities offered him for a drink, may choose strong drink instead of water–or rather, he is restricted to strong drink where water might once have been had–the spring being piped now half a mile to the barns for the horses. And this shack, as it is locally called, run by a Mexican, is still the inn at Calabasas. And it continues to contribute, through its stirring annals, to the tragic history of the continental divide.
It need hardly be said that Duke Morgan laid claim also to the Calabasas Spring. But on this the company, being a corporation, fought him. And after somewhat less of argument and somewhat more of siege and shooting, a compromise was reached whereby the company bought annually at an exorbitant price all of Duke, Satterlee, and Vance Morgan’s hay, and as the Morgans had small rivers of water in the mountains, and never, except when crowded, drank water, a modus vivendi was arranged between the claimants. The only sufferer through this was the Mexican publican, who found every Morgan his landlord, and demanding from him tithes over the bar. But force is usually met with cunning, and such Morgans as would not pay in advance at Calabasas, when thirsty, often found the half-mad publican out of goods.
The Calabasas Inn stood in one of the loneliest canyons of the whole seventy miles between Sleepy Cat and Thief River; it looked in its depletion to be what it was, a sombre, mysterious, sun, wind, and alkali beaten pile, around which no one by any chance ever saw a sign of life. It was a ruin like those pretentious deserted structures sometimes seen in frontier towns–relics of the wide-open days, which stand afterward, stark and sombre, to serve as bats’ nests or blind-pigs. The inn at Calabasas looked its part–a haunt of rustlers, a haven of nameless men, a refuge of road-agents.
The very first time de Spain made an inspection trip over the stage line with Lefever, he was conscious of the sinister air of this lonely building. He and Lefever had ridden down from the barn, while their horses were being changed, to look at the place. De Spain wanted to look over everything connected in any way, however remotely, with the operation of his wagons, and this joint, Lefever had told him, was where the freighters and drivers were not infrequently robbed of their money. It was here that one of their own men, Bill McCarty, once “scratched a man’s neck” with a knife–which, Bill explained, he just “happened” to have in his hand–for cheating at cards. Lefever pointed out the unlucky gambler’s grave as he and de Spain rode into the canyon toward the inn.
Not a sign of any sort was displayed about the habitation. No man was invited to enter, no man warned to keep out, none was anywhere in sight. The stage men dismounted, threw their lines, pushed open the front door of the house and entered a room of perhaps sixteen by twenty feet. It had been the original barroom. A long, high, elaborately carved mahogany bar, as much out of keeping as it possibly could be with its surroundings, stretched across the farther side of the room. The left end, as they faced the bar, was brought around to escape a small window opening on a court or patio to the rear of the room. Back of the bar itself, about midway, a low door in the bare wall gave entrance to a rear room. Aside from this big, queer-looking piece of mahogany, the low window at the left end of it, and the low door at the back, the room presented nothing but walls. Two windows flanking the front door helped to light it, but not a mirror, picture, chair, table, bottle, or glass was to be seen. De Spain covered every feature of the interior at a glance. “Quiet around here, John,” he remarked casually.
“This is the quietest place in the Rocky Mountains most of the time. But when it is noisy, believe me, it is noisy. Look at the bullet-holes in the walls.”
“The old story,” remarked de Spain, inspecting with mild-mannered interest the punctured plastering, “they always shoot high.”
He walked over to the left end of the bar, noting the hard usage shown by the ornate mahogany, and spreading his hands wide open, palms down, on the face of it, glanced at the low window on his left, opening on the gravelled patio. He peered, in the semidarkness, at the battered door behind the bar.
“Henry,” observed Lefever, “if you are looking for a drink, it would only be fair, as well as politic, to call the Mexican.”
“Thank you, John, I’m not looking for one. And I know you don’t drink.”
“You want to know, then, where the Mexican keeps his gun?” hazarded Lefever.
“Not especially. I just want to know–”
“Everything.”
“What’s behind the bar. That’s natural, isn’t it?”
Very complete fittings and compartments told of the labor spent in preparing this inner side for the convenience of the bartender and the requirements of exacting patrons, but nothing in the way of equipment, not so much as a pewter spoon, lay anywhere visible.
De Spain, turning, looked all around the room again. “You wouldn’t think,” he said slowly, “from looking at the place there was a road-agent within a thousand miles.”
“You wouldn’t think, from riding through the Superstition Mountains there was a lion within a thousand miles. I’ve hunted them for eleven years, and I never saw one except when the dogs drove ’em out; but for eleven years they saw me. If we haven’t been seen coming in here by some of this Calabasas bunch, I miss my guess,” declared Lefever cheerfully.
The batten door behind the bar now began to open slowly and noiselessly. Lefever peered through it. “Come in, Pedro,” he cried reassuringly, “come in, man. This is no officer, no revenue agent looking for your license. Meet a friend, Pedro,” he continued encouragingly, as the swarthy publican, low-browed and sullen, emerged very deliberately from the inner darkness into the obscurity of the barroom, and bent his one good eye searchingly on de Spain. “This,” Lefever’s left hand lay familiarly on the back of de Spain’s shoulder, “is our new manager, Mr. Henry de Spain. Henry, shake hands with Mexico.”
This invitation to shake hands seemed an empty formality. De Spain never shook hands with anybody; at least if he did so, he extended, through habit long inured, his left hand, with an excuse for the soreness of his right. Pedro did not even bat his remaining eye at the invitation. The situation, as Lefever facetiously remarked, remained about where it was before he spoke, and nothing daunted, he asked de Spain what he would drink. De Spain sidestepped again by asking for a cigar. Lefever, professing he would not drink alone, called for cigarettes. While Pedro produced them, from nowhere apparently, as a conjurer picks cards out of the air, the sound of galloping horses came through the open door. A moment later three men walked, single file, into the room. De Spain stood at the left end of the bar, and Lefever introduced him to Gale Morgan, to David Sassoon, and to Sassoon’s crony, Deaf Sandusky, as the new stage-line manager. The later arrivals lined up before the bar, Sandusky next to Lefever and de Spain, so he could hear what was said. Pedro from his den produced two queer-looking bottles and a supply of glasses.
“De Spain,” Gale Morgan began bluntly, “one of our men was put off a stage of yours last week by Frank Elpaso.” He spoke without any preliminary compliments, and his heavy voice was bellicose.
De Spain, regarding him undisturbed, answered after a little pause: “Elpaso told me he put a man off his stage last week for fighting.”
“No,” contradicted Morgan loudly, “not for fighting. Elpaso was drunk.”
“What’s the name of the man Elpaso put off, John?” asked de Spain, looking at Lefever.
Morgan hooked his thumb toward the man standing at his side. “Here’s the man right here, Dave Sassoon.”
Sassoon never looked a man in the face when the man looked at him, except by implication; it was almost impossible, without surprising him, to catch his eyes with your eyes. He seemed now to regard de Spain keenly, as the latter, still attending to Morgan’s statement, replied: “Elpaso tells a pretty straight story.”
“Elpaso couldn’t tell a straight story if he tried,” interjected Sassoon.
“I have the statement of three other passengers; they confirm Elpaso. According to them, Sassoon–” de Spain looked straight at the accused, “was drunk and abusive, and kept trying to put some of the other passengers off. Finally he put his feet in the lap of Pumperwasser, our tank and windmill man, and Pumperwasser hit him.”
Morgan, stepping back from the bar, waved his hand with an air of finality toward his inoffensive companion: “Here is Sassoon, right here–he can tell the whole story.”
“Those fellows were miners,” muttered Sassoon. His utterance was broken, but he spoke fast. “They’ll side with the guards every time against a cattleman.”
“There’s only one fair thing to do, de Spain,” declared Morgan. He looked severely at de Spain: “Discharge Elpaso.”
De Spain, his hands resting on the bar, drew one foot slowly back. “Not on the showing I have now,” he said. “One of the passengers who joined in the statement is Jeffries, the railroad superintendent at Sleepy Cat.”
“Expect a railroad superintendent to tell the truth about a Calabasas man?” demanded Sassoon.
“I should expect him at least to be sober,” retorted de Spain.
“Sassoon,” interposed Morgan belligerently, “is a man whose word can always be depended on.”
“To convey his meaning,” intervened Lefever cryptically. “Of course, I know,” he asserted, earnest to the point of vehemence. “Every one in Calabasas has the highest respect for Sassoon. That is understood. And,” he added with as much impressiveness as if he were talking sense, “everybody in Calabasas would be sorry to see Sassoon put off a stage. But Sassoon is off: that is the situation. We are sorry. If it occurs again–”
“What do you mean?” thundered Morgan, resenting the interference. “De Spain is the manager, isn’t he? What we want to know is, what you are going to do about it?” he demanded, addressing de Spain again.
“There is nothing more to be done,” returned de Spain composedly. “I’ve already told Elpaso if Sassoon starts another fight on a stage to put him off again.”
Morgan’s fist came down on the bar. “Look here, de Spain! You come from Medicine Bend, don’t you? Well, you can’t bully Music Mountain men–understand that.”
“Any time you have a real grievance, Morgan, I’ll be glad to consider it,” said de Spain. “When one of your men is drunk and quarrelsome he will be put off like any other disturber. That we can’t avoid. Public stages can’t be run any other way.”
“All right,” retorted Morgan. “If you take that tack for your new management, we’ll see how you get along running stages down in this country.”
“We will run them peaceably, just as long as we can,” smiled de Spain. “We will get on with everybody that gives us a chance.”
Morgan pointed a finger at him. “I give you a chance, de Spain, right now. Will you discharge Elpaso?”
“No.”
Morgan almost caught his breath at the refusal. But de Spain could be extremely blunt, and in the parting shots between the two he gave no ground.
“Jeffries put me here to stop this kind of rowdyism on the stages,” he said to Lefever on their way back to the barn. “This is a good time to begin. And Sassoon and Gale Morgan are good men to begin with,” he added.
As the horses of the two men emerged from the canyon they saw a slender horsewoman riding in toward the barn from the Music Mountain trail. She stopped in front of McAlpin, the barn boss, who stood outside the office door. McAlpin, the old Medicine Bend barnman, had been promoted from Sleepy Cat by the new manager. De Spain recognized the roan pony, but, aside from that, a glance at the figure of the rider, as she sat with her back to him, was enough to assure him of Nan Morgan. He spurred ahead fast enough to overhear a request she was making of McAlpin to mail a letter for her. She also asked McAlpin, just as de Spain drew up, whether the down stage had passed. McAlpin told her it had. De Spain, touching his hat, spoke: “I am going right up to Sleepy Cat. I’ll mail your letter if you wish.”
She looked at him in some surprise, and then glanced toward Lefever, who now rode up. De Spain was holding out his hand for the letter. His eyes met Nan’s, and each felt the moment was a sort of challenge. De Spain, a little self-conscious under her inspection, was aware only of her rather fearless eyes and the dark hair under her fawn cowboy hat.
“Thank you,” she responded evenly. “If the stage is gone I will hold it to add something.” So saying, she tucked the letter inside her blouse and spoke to her pony, which turned leisurely down the road.
“I’m trying to get acquainted with your country to-day,” returned de Spain, managing with his knee to keep his own horse moving alongside Nan as she edged away.
She seemed disinclined to answer, but the silence and the awkwardness of his presence drew at length a dry disclaimer: “This is not my country.”
“I understood,” exclaimed de Spain, following his doubtful advantage, “you lived out this way.”
“I live near Music Mountain,” returned Nan somewhat ungraciously, using her own skill at the same time to walk her horse away from her unwelcome companion.
“I’ve heard of Music Mountain,” continued de Spain, urging his lagging steed. “I’ve often wanted to get over there to hunt.”
Nan, without speaking, ruthlessly widened the distance between the two. De Spain unobtrusively spurred his steed to greater activity. “You must have a great deal of game around you. Do you hunt?” he asked.
He knew she was famed as a huntress, but he could make no headway whatever against her studied reserve. He watched her hands, graceful even in heavy gloves; he noticed the neck-piece of her tan blouse, and liked the brown throat and the chin set so resolutely against him. He surmised that she perhaps felt some contempt for him because she had outshot him, and he continued to ask about game, hoping for a chance in some far-off time to redeem his marksmanship before her and giving her every possible chance to invite him to try the hunting around Music Mountain.
She was deaf to the broadest hints; and when at length she excused herself and turned her pony from the Sleepy Cat road into the Morgan Gap trail, de Spain had been defeated in every attempt to arouse the slightest interest in anything he had said. But, watching with regret, at the parting, the trim lines of her figure as she dashed away on the desert trail, seated as if a part of her spirited horse, he felt only a fast-rising resolution to attempt again to break through her stubborn reticence and know her better.