De Spain made no answer beyond keeping his eyes well on Sanduskys eyes. Tenison, overhearing the last words, awoke to the situation and rose from his case. He made his way through the crowd around the disputants and brusquely directed the dealer to close the game. While Sandusky was cashing in, Tenison took Logan aside. What Tenison said was not audible, but it sufficed to quiet the little fellow. The only thing further to be settled was as to who should leave the room
last, since neither party was willing to go first. Tenison, after a formal conference with Lefever and Logan, offered to take Sandusky and Logan by a private stairway to the billiard-room, while Lefever took de Spain and Scott out by way of the main entrance. This was arranged, and when the railroad men reached the street rain had ceased falling.
Scott warned de Spain to keep within doors, and de Spain promised to do so. But when they left him he started out at once to see whether he could not, by some happy chance, encounter Nan.
CHAPTER IX A CUP OF COFFEE
But this danger, which after all was a portion of his responsibility in freeing his stages from the depredations of the Calabasas gang, failed to make on him the moving impression of one moment of Nan Morgans eyes. She could upset him completely, he was forced to admit, by a glance, a word, a gesturea mere turn of her head. There was in the whole world nothing he wanted to do so much as in some way to please heryet it seemed his ill luck to get continually deeper into her bad graces. It had so stunned and angered him to meet her intent on entering a gambling-hall that he was tormented the whole night. Association with outlawswhat might it not do for even such a girl? While her people were not all equally reprobate, some of them at least were not far better than the criminals of Calabasas. To conceive of her gambling publicly in Sleepy Cat was too much. He had even taken a horse, after cautiously but persistently haunting the streets for an hour, and ridden across the river away out on the mountain trail, hoping to catch a sight of her.
On his way back to town from this wild-goose chase, he heard the sound of hoofs. He was nearing the river and he turned his horse into a clump of trees beside the bridge. The night was very dark, but he was close to the trail and had made up his mind to speak to Nan if it were she. In another moment his ear told him there were two horses approaching. He waited for the couple to cross the bridge, and they passed him so close he could almost have touched the nearer rider. Then he realized, as the horse passing beside him shied, that it was Sandusky and Logan riding silently by.
For a week de Spain spent most of his time in Sleepy Cat trying to catch sight of Nan. His reflection on the untoward incidents that had set them at variance left him rebellious. He meditated more about putting himself right with her than about all his remaining concerns together. A strange fire had seized himthat fire of the imagination which scorns fair words and fine reasoning, but which, smothered, burns in secret until, fanned by the wind of accident, it bursts out the more fiercely because of the depths in which it has smouldered.
Every day that de Spain rode across the open country, his eyes turned to the far range and to Music Mountain. The rounded, distant, immutable peakmajestic as the sun, cold as the stars, shrouding in its unknown fastnesses the mysteries of the ages and the secrets of timemeant to him now only this mountain girl whom its solitude sheltered and to whom his thoughts continually came back.
Within two weeks he became desperate. He rode the Gap trail from Sleepy Cat again and again for miles and miles in the effort to encounter her. He came to know every ridge and hollow on it, every patch and stone between the lava beds and the Rat River. And in spite of the counsels of his associates, who warned him to beware of traps, he spent, under one pretext or another, much of the time either on the stages to and from Calabasas or in the saddle toward Morgans Gap, looking for Nan.
Killing time in this way, after a fruitless ride, his persistence was one day most unexpectedly rewarded at the Calabasas barns. He had ridden through a hot sun from Sleepy Cat, passing the up stage half-way to Calabasas, and had struck from there directly out on the Sinks toward Morgans Gap. Riding thence around the lower lava beds, he had headed for Calabasas, where he had an appointment to meet Scott and Lefever at five oclock. When de Spain reached the Calabasas barn, McAlpin, the barn boss, was standing in the doorway. Youd never be comin from Sleepy Cat in the saddle! exclaimed McAlpin incredulously. De Spain nodded affirmatively as he dismounted. Hot ride, sir; a hot day, commented
McAlpin, shaking his head dubiously as he called a man to take the horse, unstrapped de Spains coat from the saddle, and followed the manager into the office.
The heat was oppressive, and de Spain unbuckled his cartridge-belt, slipped his revolver from the holster, mechanically stuck it inside his trousers waistband, hung the heavy belt up under his coat, and, sitting down, called for the stage report and asked whether the new blacksmith had sobered up. When McAlpin had given him all minor information called for, de Spain walked with him out into the barn to inspect the horses. Passing the very last of the box-stalls, the manager saw in it a pony. He stopped. No second glance was needed to tell him it was a good horse; then he realized that this wiry, sleek-legged roan, contentedly munching at the moment some company hay, was Nan Morgans.