DANGER
With never such apprehension, never such stealth, never so heavy a
secret, so sensible a burning in cheek and eye, as when she tiptoed
into her uncle's room at midnight, Nan's heart beat as the wings of a
bird beat from the broken door of a cage into a forbidden sky of
happiness. She had left the room a girl; she came back to it a woman.
Sleep she did not expect or even ask for; the night was all too short
to think of those tense, fearful moments that had pledged her to her
lover. When the anxieties of her situation overwhelmed her, as they
would again and again, she felt herself in the arms of this strange,
resolute man whom all her own hated and whom she knew she already
loved beyond all power to put away. In her heart, she had tried this
more than once: she knew she could not, would not ever do it, or even
try to do it, again.
She rejoiced in his love. She trusted. When he spoke she believed this
man whom no one around her would believe; and she, who never had
believed what other men avowed, and who detested their avowals,
believed de Spain, and secretly, guiltily, glowed in every word of his
devotion and breathed faint in its every caress.
Night could hardly come fast enough, after the next long day. A
hundred times during that day she reminded herself, while the slow,
majestic sun shone simmering on the hot desert, that she had promised
to steal out into the grounds the minute darkness fell--he would be
waiting. A hundred times in the long afternoon, Nan looked into the
cloudless western sky and with puny eager hands would have pushed the
lagging orb on its course that she might sooner give herself into the
arms where she felt her place so sure, her honor so safe, her
helplessness so protected, herself so loved.
How her cheeks burned after supper when she asked her uncle for leave
to post a letter down-town! How breathless with apprehension she
halted as de Spain stepped from the shadow of the trees and drew her
importunately beneath them for the kiss that had burned on her
troubled lips all day! How, girl-like, knowing his caresses were all
her own--knowing she could at an instant call forth enough to smother
her--she tyrannized his importuning and, like a lovely miser, hoarded
her responsiveness under calm eyes and laconic whispers until, when
she did give back his eagerness, she made his senses reel.
How dreamily she listened to every word he let fall in his outpouring
of devotion; how gravely she put up her hand to restrain his busy
intrusion, and asked if he knew that no man in the world, least of all
her fierce and burly cousin, had ever touched her lips until he
himself forced a kiss on them the night before: "And now!" She hid her
face against his shoulder. "Oh, Henry, how I love you! I'm so ashamed,
I couldn't tell you if it weren't night: I'll never look you in the
face again in the daytime."
And when he told her how little he himself had had to do with, and how
little he knew about girls, even from boyhood, how she feigned not to
believe, and believed him still! They were two children raised in the
magic of an hour to the supreme height of life and dizzy together on
its summit.
"I don't see how you can care for _me_, Henry. Oh, I mean it," she
protested, holding her head resolutely up. "You know who we are, away
off there in the mountains. Every one hates us; I suppose they've
plenty of reason to: we hate everybody else. And why shouldn't we?
We're at war with every one. You know, better than I do, what goes on
in the Gap. I don't want to know; I try not to know; Uncle Duke tries
to keep things from me. When you began to act--as if you cared for
me--that day on Music--I couldn't believe you meant it at all. And
yet--I'm afraid I liked to try to think you did. When you looked at me
I felt as if you could see right through me."
Confidences never came to an end.
And diplomacy came into its own almost at once in de Spain's efforts
to improve his relations with the implacable Duke. The day came when
Nan's uncle could be taken home. De Spain sent to him a soft-spoken
emissary, Bob Scott, offering to provide a light stage, with his
compliments, for the trip. The intractable mountaineer, with his
refusal to accept the olive-branch, blew Bob out of the room. Nan was
crushed by the result, but de Spain was not to be dismayed.
Lefever came to him the day after Nan had got her uncle home. "Henry,"
he began without any preliminaries, "there is one thing about your
precipitate ride up Music Mountain that I never got clear in my mind.
After the fight, your cartridge-belt was hanging up in the barn at
Calabasas for two weeks. You walked in to us that morning with your
belt buckled on. You told us you put it on before you came up-stairs.
What? Oh, yes, I know, Henry. But that belt wasn't hanging
down-stairs with your coat earlier in the evening. No, Henry: it
wasn't, not when I looked. Don't tell me such things, because--I don't
know. Where was the belt when you found it?"
"Some distance from the coat, John. I admit that. I'll tell you: some
one had moved the belt. It was not where I left it. I was hurried the
morning I rode in and I can't tell you just where I found it."
Lefever never batted an eyelash. "I know you can't, Henry. Because you
won't. That Scotch hybrid McAlpin knows a few things, too, that he
won't tell. All I want to say is, you can trust that man too far. He's
got all my recent salary. Every time Jeffries raises my pay that
hairy-pawed horse-doctor reduces it just so much a month. And he does
it with one pack of fifty-two small cards that you could stick into
your vest pocket."
"McAlpin has a wife and children to support," suggested de Spain.
"Don't think for a moment he does it," returned Lefever vehemently. "I
support his wife and children, myself."
"You shouldn't play cards, John."
"It was by playing cards that I located Sassoon, just the same. A
little game with your friend Bull Page, by the way. And say, that man
blew into Calabasas one day here lately with a twenty-dollar bill;
it's a fact. Now, where do you suppose he got twenty dollars in one
bill? I know _I_ had it two hours after he got there and then in
fifteen minutes that blamed bull-whacker you pay thirty-two a week to
took it away from me. But I got Sassoon spotted. And where do you
suppose Split-lips is this minute?"
"Morgan's Gap."
"Quite so--and been there all the time. Now, Bob has the old warrant
for him: the question is, how to get him out."
De Spain reflected a moment before replying: "John, I'd let him alone
just for the present," he said at length.
Lefever's eyes bulged: "Let Sassoon alone?"
"He will keep--for a while, anyway."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't want to stir things up too strong over that way just at the
minute, John."
"Why not?"
De Spain shuffled a little: "Well, Jeffries thinks we might let things
rest till Duke Morgan and the others get over some of their
soreness."
Lefever, astonished at the indifference of de Spain to the opportunity
of nabbing Sassoon, while he could be found, expostulated strongly.
When de Spain persisted, Lefever, huffed, confided to Bob Scott that
when the general manager got ready he could catch Sassoon himself.
De Spain wanted for Nan's sake, as well as his own, to see what could
be done to pacify her uncle and his relatives so that a wedge might be
driven in between them and their notorious henchman, and Sassoon
brought to book with their consent; on this point, however, he was not
quite bold-faced enough to take his friends into his confidence.
De Spain, as fiery a lover as he was a fighter, stayed none of his
courting because circumstances put Music Mountain between him and his
mistress. And Nan, after she had once surrendered, was nothing behind
in the chances she unhesitatingly took to arrange her meetings with de
Spain. He found in her, once her girlish timidity was overcome and a
woman's confidence had replaced it, a disregard of consequences, so
far as their own plans were concerned, that sometimes took away his
breath.
The very day after she had got her uncle home, with the aid of
Satterlee Morgan and an antiquated spring wagon, Nan rode, later in
the afternoon, over to Calabasas. The two that would not be restrained
had made their appointment at the lower lava beds half-way between
the Gap and Calabasas. The sun was sinking behind the mountain when de
Spain galloped out of the rocks as Nan turned from the trail and rode
toward the black and weather-beaten meeting-place.
They could hardly slip from their saddles fast enough to reach each
other's arms--Nan, trim as a model in fresh khaki, trying with a
handkerchief hardly larger than a postage-stamp to wipe the flecks of
dust from her pink cheeks, while de Spain, between dabs, covered them
with importunate greetings. Looking engrossed into each other's eyes,
and both, in their eagerness, talking at once, they led their horses
into hiding and sat down to try to tell all that had happened since
their parting. Wars and rumors of wars, feuds and raidings, fights and
pursuits were no more to them than to babes in the woods. All that
mattered to them--sitting or pacing together and absorbed, in the path
of the long-cold volcanic stream buried in the shifting sands of the
desert--was that they should clasp each other's clinging hands, listen
each to the other's answering voice, look unrestrained into each
other's questioning eyes.
They met in both the lava beds--the upper lay between the Gap and
town--more than once. And one day came a scare. They were sitting on
a little ledge well up in the rocks where de Spain could overlook the
trail east and west, and were talking about a bungalow some day to be
in Sleepy Cat, when they saw men riding from the west toward
Calabasas. There were three in the party, one lagging well behind. The
two men leading, Nan and de Spain made out to be Gale Morgan and Page.
They saw the man coming on behind stop his horse and lean forward, his
head bent over the trail. He was examining the sand and halted quite a
minute to study something. Both knew what he was studying--the
hoof-prints of Nan's pony heading toward the lava. Nan shrank back and
with de Spain moved a little to where they could watch the intruder
without being seen. Nan whispered first: "It's Sassoon." De Spain
nodded. "What shall we do?" breathed Nan.
"Nothing yet," returned her lover, watching the horseman, whose eyes
were still fixed on the pony's trail, but who was now less than a half
mile away and riding straight toward them.
De Spain, his eyes on the danger and his hand laid behind Nan's waist,
led the way guardedly down to where their horses stood. Nan, needing
no instructions for the emergency, took the lines of the horses, and
de Spain, standing beside his own horse, reached his right hand over
in front of the pommel and, regarding Sassoon all the while, drew his
rifle slowly from its scabbard. The blood fled Nan's cheeks. She said
nothing. Without looking at her, de Spain drew her own rifle from her
horse's side, passed it into her hand and, moving over in front of the
horses, laid his left hand reassuringly on her waist again. At that
moment, little knowing what eyes were on him in the black fragments
ahead, Sassoon looked up. Then he rode more slowly forward. The color
returned to Nan's cheeks: "Do you want me to use this?" she murmured,
indicating the rifle.
"Certainly not. But if the others turn back, I may need it. Stay right
here with the horses. He will lose the trail in a minute now. When he
reaches the rock I'll go down and keep him from getting off his
horse--he won't fight from the saddle."
But with an instinct better than knowledge, Sassoon, like a
wolf scenting danger, stopped again. He scanned the broken and
forbidding hump in front, now less than a quarter of a mile
from him, questioningly. His eyes seemed to rove inquisitively
over the lava pile as if asking why a Morgan Gap pony had visited
it. In another moment he wheeled his horse and spurred rapidly
after his companions.
The two drew a deep breath. De Spain laughed: "What we don't know,
never hurts us." He drew Nan to him. Holding the rifle muzzle at arm's
length as the butt rested on the ground, she looked up from the
shoulder to which she was drawn: "What should you have done if he had
come?"
"Taken you to the Gap and then taken him to Sleepy Cat, where he
belongs."
"But, Henry, suppose----"
"There wouldn't have been any 'suppose.'"
"Suppose the others had come."
"With one rifle, here, a man could stand off a regiment. Nan, do you
know, you fit into my arm as if you were made for it?"
His courage was contagious. When he had tired her with fresh
importunities he unpinned her felt hat and held it out of reach while
he kissed and toyed with and disarranged her hair. In revenge, she
snatched from his pocket his little black memorandum-book and some
letters and read, or pretended to read them, and seizing her
opportunity she broke from him and ran with the utmost fleetness up
into the rocks.
In two minutes they had forgotten the episode almost as completely as
if it never had been. But when they left for home, they agreed they
would not meet there again. They knew that Sassoon, like a jackal,
would surely come back, and more than once, until he found out just
what that trail or any subsequent trail leading into the beds meant.
The lovers laughed the jackal's spying to scorn and rode away,
bantering, racing, and chasing each other in the saddle, as solely
concerned in their happiness as if there were nothing else of moment
in the whole wide world.