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.