Nan of Music Mountain

De Spain wore an ordinary sack street suit, with no sign of a weapon about him; but none of those who considered themselves favored spectators of a long-awaited encounter felt any doubt as to his ability to put his hand on one at incomparably short notice. There was, however, no trace of hostility or suspicion in de Spain’s greeting.

“Hello, Duke Morgan,” he said frankly. Morgan looked around. His face hardened when he saw de Spain, and he involuntarily took a short step backward. De Spain, with his left hand lying carelessly on the cigar case, faced him. “I heard you wanted to see me,” continued de Spain. “I want to see you. How’s your back since you went home?”

Morgan eyed him with a mixture of suspicion and animosity. He took what was to him the most significant part of de Spain’s greeting first and threw his response into words as short as words could be chopped: “What do you want to see me about?”

“Nothing unpleasant, I hope,” returned de Spain. “Let’s sit down a minute.”

“Say what you got to say.”

“Well, don’t take my head off, Duke. I was sorry to hear you were hurt. And I’ve been trying to figure out how to make it easier for you to get to and from town while you are getting strong. Jeffries and I both feel there’s been a lot of unnecessary hard feeling between the Morgans and the company, and we want to ask you to accept this to show some of it’s ended.” De Spain put his left hand into his side pocket and held out an unsealed envelope to Morgan. Duke, taking the envelope, eyed it distrustfully. “What’s this?” he demanded, opening it and drawing out a card.

“Something for easier riding. An annual pass for you and one over the stage line between Calabasas and Sleepy Cat–with Mr. Jeffries’s compliments.”

Like a flash, Morgan tore the card pass in two and threw it angrily to the floor. “Tell ‘Mr.’ Jeffries,” he exclaimed violently, “to–”

The man that chanced at that moment to be lying in the nearest chair slid quietly but imperiously out from under the razor and started with the barbers for the rear door, wiping the lather from one unshaven side of his face with a neck towel as he took his hasty way. At the back of the shop a fat man, sitting in a chair on the high, shoe-shining platform, while a negro boy polished him, rose at Morgan’s imprecation and tried to step over the bootblack’s head to the floor below. The boy, trying to get out of the way, jumped back, and the fat man fell, or pretended to fall, over him–for it might be seen that the man, despite his size, had lighted like a cat on his feet and was instantly half-way up to the front of the shop, exclaiming profanely but collectedly at the lad’s awkwardness, before de Spain had had time to reply to the insult.

The noise and confusion of the incident were considerable. Morgan was too old a fighter to look behind him at a critical moment. No man could say he had meant to draw when he stamped the card underfoot, but de Spain read it in his eye and knew that Lefever’s sudden diversion at the rear had made him hesitate; the crisis passed like a flash. “Sorry you feel that way, Duke,” returned de Spain, undisturbed. “It is a courtesy we were glad to extend. And I want to speak to you about Nan, too.”

Morgan’s face was livid. “What about her?”

“She has given me permission to ask your consent to our marriage,” said de Spain, “sometime in the reasonable future.”

It was difficult for Duke to speak at all, he was so infuriated. “You can get my consent in just one way,” he managed to say, “that’s by getting me.”

“Then I’m afraid I’ll never get it, for I’ll never ‘get’ you, Duke.”

A torrent of oaths fell from Morgan’s cracked lips. He tried to tell de Spain in his fury that he knew all about his underhanded work, he called him more than one hard name, made no secret of his deadly enmity, and challenged him to end their differences then and there.

De Spain did not move. His left hand again lay on the cigar case. “Duke,” he said, when his antagonist had exhausted his vituperation, “I wouldn’t fight you, anyway. You’re crazy angry at me for no reason on earth. If you’ll give me just one good reason for feeling the way you do toward me, and the way you’ve always acted toward me since I came up to this country, I’ll fight you.”

“Pull your gun,” cried Morgan with an imprecation.

“I won’t do it. You call me a coward. Ask these boys here in the shop whether they agree with you on that. You might as well call me an isosceles triangle. You’re just crazy sore at me when I want to be friends with you. Instead of pulling my gun, Duke, I’ll lay it out on the case, here, to show you that all I ask of you is to talk reason.” De Spain, reaching with his left hand under the lapel of his coat, took a Colt’s revolver from its breast harness and laid it, the muzzle toward himself, on the plate-glass top of the cigar stand. It reduced him to the necessity of a spring into Morgan for the smallest chance for his life if Morgan should draw; but de Spain was a desperate gambler in such matters even at twenty-eight, and he laid his wagers on what he could read in another’s eye.

“There’s more reasons than one why I shouldn’t fight you,” he said evenly. “Duke, you’re old enough to be my father–do you realize that? What’s the good of our shooting each other up?” he asked, ignoring Morgan’s furious interruptions. “Who’s to look after Nan when you go–as you must, before very many years? Have you ever asked yourself that? Do you want to leave her to that pack of wolves in the Gap? You know, just as well as I do, the Gap is no place for a high-bred, fine-grained girl like Nan Morgan. But the Gap is your home, and you’ve done right to keep her under your roof and under your eye. Do you think I’d like to pull a trigger on a man that’s been a father to Nan? Damnation, Duke, could you expect me to do it, willingly? Nan is a queen. The best in the world isn’t good enough for her–I’m not good enough, I know that. She’s dear to you, she is dear to me. If you really want to see me try to use a gun, send me a man that will insult or abuse her. If you want to use your own gun, use it on me if I ever insult or abuse her–is that fair?”

“Damn your fine words,” exclaimed Morgan slowly and implacably. “They don’t pull any wool over my eyes. I know you, de Spain–I know your breed–”

“What’s that?”

Morgan checked himself at that tone. “You can’t sneak into my affairs any deeper,” he cried. “Keep away from my blood! I know how to take care of my own. I’ll do it. So help me God, if you ever take any one of my kin away from me–it’ll be over my dead body!” He ended with a bitter oath and a final taunt: “Is that fair?”

“No,” retorted de Spain good-naturedly, “it’s not fair. And some day, Duke, you’ll be the first to say so. You won’t shake hands with me now, I know, so I’ll go. But the day will come when you will.”

He covered his revolver with his left hand, and replaced it under his coat. The fat man who had been leaning patiently against a barber’s chair ten feet from the disputants, stepped forward again lightly as a cat. “Henry,” he exclaimed, in a low but urgent tone, his hand extended, “just a minute. There’s a long-distance telephone call on the wire for you.” He pointed to the office door. “Take the first booth, Henry. Hello, Duke,” he added, greeting Morgan with an extended hand, as de Spain walked back. “How are you making it, old man?”

Duke Morgan grunted.

“Sorry to interrupt your talk,” continued Lefever. “But the barns at Calabasas are burning–telephone wires from there cut, too–they had to pick up the Thief River trunk line to get a message through. Makes it bad, doesn’t it?” Lefever pulled a wry face. “Duke, there’s somebody yet around Calabasas that needs hanging, isn’t there? Yes.”

CHAPTER XXII

GALE PERSISTS

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.