Nan of Music Mountain Part 16

But when he opened his eyes later, and with a clearer head, he found food and drink near. Unable to believe his sight, he fancied his wavering senses deceiving him, until he put out his hand and felt actually the substance of what he saw. He took up a bottle of milk incredulously, and sipped at it with the caution of a man not unused to periods of starvation. He broke eggs and swallowed them, at intervals, hungrily from the sh.e.l.l; and meat he cached, animal-like, in near-by crannies and, manlike, in his pockets.

He was determined, if she should come again, to intercept his visitor.

For forty-eight hours he tried cat-naps with an occasional sandwich to keep up his strength. Nan returned unseen, and disappeared despite his watchfulness. A new supply of food proved she had been near, but that it would be hard to time her coming.

When she did come, the third time, an innocent snare discovered her presence. It was just before day, and de Spain had so scattered small obstacles--handfuls of gravel and little chips of rock--that should she cross the ledge in the dark she could hardly escape rousing him.

The device betrayed her. "I'm awake," announced de Spain at once from his retreat. When she stopped at the words he could not see her; she had flattened herself, standing, against a wall of the ledge. He waited patiently. "You give me no chance to thank you," he went on after a pause. Nan, drawing nearer, put down a small parcel. "I don't need any thanks," she replied with calculated coolness. "I am hoping when you are well enough you will go away, quietly, in the night. That will be the only way you can thank me."

"I shall be as glad to go as you can be to have me," rejoined de Spain. "But that won't be thanking you as I am going to. If you think you can save my life and refuse my thanks as I mean to express them--you are mistaken. I will be perfectly honest. Lying out here isn't just what I'd choose for comfort. But if by doing it I could see you once in two or three days----"

"You won't see me again."

"No news could be worse. And if I can't, I don't know how I'm going to get out at all. I've no horse--you know that. I can't stand on my foot yet; if you had a light you might see for yourself. I think I showed you my gun. If you could tell me where I am----"

He halted on the implied question. Nan took ample time to reply.

"Do you mean to tell me you don't know where you are?" she asked, and there was a touch of vexed incredulity in her tone.

De Spain seemed unmoved by her scepticism. "I can't tell you anything else," he said simply. "You couldn't have any idea I crawled up here for the fun of it."

"I've been trying to think," she returned, and he perceived in the hardness of her voice how at bay she felt in giving him the least bit of information, "whether I ought to tell you anything at all----"

"I couldn't very decently take any unfair advantage after what you've done, could I?"

"Then--you are in Morgan's Gap," she said swiftly, as if she wanted it off her mind.

There was no movement of surprise, neither was there any answer. "I supposed, when I found you here, you knew that," she added less resolutely; the darkness and silence were plainly a strain.

"I know you are telling the truth," he responded at length. "But I can hardly believe it. That's the reason, of course, you _did_ find me. I rode a good many miles that night without knowing where I was or what I was doing. I certainly never figured on winding up here. How could I get in here without being stopped?"

"Everybody inside the Gap was outside hunting for you, I suppose."

"There isn't much use asking where I am, in the Gap. I never was inside but once. I shouldn't know if you did tell me."

"You are at the foot of Music Mountain, about a mile from where I live."

"You must have thought I meant to raid your house. I didn't. I was. .h.i.t. I got mixed up in trying to get away. You want me out of here?"

"Very much."

"No more than I want to get out. Perhaps by to-morrow I could walk a few miles. I should have to a.s.sa.s.sinate somebody to get some ammunition."

"It wouldn't be hard for you to do that, I presume."

Her words and her tone revealed the intensity of her dislike and the depth of her distrust.

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, without resentment: "You are ashamed already of saying that, aren't you?"

"No, I am not," she answered defiantly.

"Yes, you are. You know it isn't true. If you believed it you never would have brought food here to save my life."

"I brought it to save some of my own people from possible death at your hands--to prevent another fight--to see if you hadn't manhood enough after being helped, to go away, when you were able to move, peaceably. One cartridge might mean one life, dear to me."

"I know whose life you mean."

"You know nothing about what I mean."

"I know better than you know yourself. If I believed you, I shouldn't respect you. Fear and mercy are two different things. If I thought you were only afraid of me, I shouldn't think much of your aid. Listen--I never took the life of any man except to defend my own----"

"No murderer that ever took anybody's life in this country ever said anything but that."

"Don't cla.s.s me with murderers."

"You are known from one end of the country to the other as a gunman."

He answered impa.s.sively: "Did these men who call me a gunman ever tell you why I'm one?" She seemed in too hostile a mood to answer. "I guess not," he went on. "Let me tell you now. The next time you hear me called a gunman you can tell them."

"I won't listen," she exclaimed, restive.

"Yes, you will listen," he said quietly; "you shall hear every word.

My father brought sheep into the Peace River country. The cattlemen picked on him to make an example of. He went out, unarmed, one night to take care of the horses. My mother heard two shots. He didn't come back. She went to look for him. He was lying under the corral gate with a hole smashed through his jaw by a rifle-bullet that tore his head half off." De Spain did not raise his voice nor did he hasten his words. "I was born one night six months after that," he continued. "My mother died that night. When a neighbor's wife took me from her arm and wrapped me in a blanket, she saw I carried the face of my father as my mother had seen it the night he was murdered. That," he said, "is what made me a 'gunman.' Not whiskey--not women--not cards--just what you've heard. And I'll tell you something else you may tell the men that call me a gunman. The man that shot down my father at his corral gate I haven't found yet. I expect to find him. For ten years I've been getting ready to find him. He is here--in these mountains. I don't even know his name. But if I live, I'll find him. And when I do, I'll tear open his head with a soft bullet in the way he tore my father's open. After I get through with that man"--he hesitated--"they may call me whatever they like."

The faint ghostliness of the coming day, writing its warning in the eastern sky, the bitter chill of the dying night, the slow, hard, impa.s.sive utterance, the darkness in which she stood listening to an enemy she could not see, the loneliness and danger of her situation combined to impress on the unwilling listener the picture of the murder, the tragic birth, and the mother's death. "You want me out of the Gap," de Spain concluded, his voice unchanged. "I want to get out.

Come back, once more, in the daytime. I will see what I can do with my foot by that time." He paused. "Will you come?"

She hesitated. "It would be too dangerous for me to come up here in the daytime. Trouble would follow."

"Come at dusk. You know I am no murderer."

"I don't know it," she persisted stubbornly. It was her final protest.

"Count, some day, on knowing it."

CHAPTER XV

CROSSING A DEEP RIVER

A grizzly bear hidden among the haystacks back of the corral would have given Nan much less anxiety than de Spain secreted in the heart of the Morgan stronghold. But as she hurried home, fearful of encountering an early rider who should ask questions, it seemed as if she might, indeed, find some way of getting rid of the troublesome foe without having it on her conscience that she had starved a wounded man to death, or that he had shot some one of her people in getting away.

Her troubled speculations were reduced now almost to wondering when de Spain would leave, and, disinclined though she felt to further parley, she believed he would go the sooner if she were to consent to see him again. Everything he had said to her seemed to unsettle her mind and to imperil impressions concerning him that she felt it dangerous, or at least treasonable, to part with. To believe anything but the worst of a man whom she heard cursed and abused continually by her uncles, cousins, and their a.s.sociates and retainers, seemed a monstrous thing--and every effort de Spain made to dislodge her prejudices called for fresh distrust on her part. What had most shaken her convictions--and it would come back to her in spite of everything she could do to keep it out of her mind--was the recollection of the murder of his father, the tragic death of his mother. As for the facts of his story, somehow she never thought of questioning them. The seal of its dreadful truth he carried on his face.

That day Nan washed her hair. On the second day--because there were no good reasons for it--she found herself deciding conscientiously to see de Spain for the last time, and toward sunset. This was about the time he had suggested, but it really seemed, after long thought, the best time. She began dressing early for her trip, and with constantly recurring dissatisfaction with her wardrobe--picking the best of her limited stock of silk stockings, choosing the freshest of her few pairs of tan boots. All of her riding-skirts looked shabby as she fretfully inspected them; but Bonita pressed out the newest one for the hurried occasion, while Nan used the interval, with more than usual care, on her troublesome hair--never less tractable, it seemed, in her life. Nothing, in truth, in her appearance, satisfied her, and she was obliged at last to turn from her gla.s.s with the hateful sigh that it made no difference anyway.

De Spain was sitting with his back against a rock, and his knees drawn up, leaning his head on his right hand and resting his elbow on the knee. His left arm hung down over his left knee, and the look on his face was one of reflection and irresolution rather than of action and decision. But he looked so restored after his brief period of nourishment that Nan, when she stepped up on the ledge at sunset, would not have known the wreck she had seen in the same place the week before.