As to the boisterous mountain-man, his resolute little cousin made no secret of her detestation of him. She denied and defied him as openly as a girl could and heard his threats with continued indifference. She was quite alone, too, in her fear of any fatal meeting between the two men who seemed determined to pursue her.
The truth was that after Calabasas, de Spain, from Thief River to Sleepy Cat, was a marked man. None sought to cross his path or his purposes. Every one agreed he would yet be killed, but not the hardiest of the men left to attack him cared to undertake the job themselves. The streets of the towns and the trails of the mountains were free as the wind to de Spain. And neither the town haunts of Calabasas men nor those of their Morgan Gap sympathizers had any champion disposed to follow too closely the alert Medicine Bend railroader.
In and about the hospital, and in the town itself, Nan found the chief obstacle to her peace of mind in the talk she could not always avoid hearing about de Spain. Convalescents in the corridors, practically all of them men, never gathered in sunny corners or at the tables in the dining-room 240 without de Spain’s name coming in some way into the talk, to be followed with varying circumstantial accounts of what really had happened that day at Calabasas.
And with all the known escapades in which he had figured, exhausted as topics, by long-winded commentators, more or less hazy stories of his earlier experiences at Medicine Bend in the company of Whispering Smith were dragged into the talk. One convalescent stage-guard at the hospital told a story one night at supper about him that chilled Nan again with strange fears, for she knew it to be true. He had had it from McAlpin himself, so the guard said, that de Spain’s father had long ago been shot down from ambush by a cattleman and that Henry de Spain had sworn to find that man and kill him. And it was hinted pretty strongly that de Spain had information when he consented to come to Sleepy Cat that the assassin still lived, and lived somewhere around the head of the Sinks.
That night, Nan dreamed. She dreamed of a sinister mark on a face that she had never before seen––a face going into bronzed young manhood with quick brown eyes looking eagerly at her. And before her wondering look it faded, dreamlike, into a soft mist, and where it had been, a man lay, lifting himself on one arm from the ground––his 241 sleeve tattered, his collar torn, his eyes half-living, half-dead, his hair clotted, his lips stiffened and distended, his face drawn. And all of this dissolved into an image of de Spain on horseback, sudden, alert, threatening, looking through the mist at an enemy. Then Nan heard the sharp report of a rifle and saw him whirl half around––struck––in his saddle, and fall. But he fell into her arms, and she woke sobbing violently.
She was upset for the whole day, moody and apprehensive, with a premonition that she should soon see de Spain––and, perhaps, hurt again. The dream unnerved her every time she thought of him. That evening the doctor came late. When he walked in he asked her if she knew it was Frontier Day, and reminded her that just a year ago she had shot against Henry de Spain and beaten the most dangerous man and the deadliest shot on the mountain divide in her rifle match. How he had grown in the imagination of Sleepy Cat and Music Mountain, she said to herself––while the doctor talked to her uncle––since that day a year ago! Then he was no more than an unknown and discomfited marksman from Medicine Bend, beaten by a mountain girl: now the most talked-of man in the high country. And the suspicion would sometimes obtrude itself with pride into her mind, that she who never mentioned 242 his name when it was discussed before her, really knew and understood him better than any of those that talked so much––that she had at least one great secret with him alone.
When leaving, the doctor wished to send over from his office medicine for her uncle. Nan offered to go with him, but the doctor said it was pretty late and Main Street pretty noisy: he preferred to find a messenger.
Nan was sitting in the sick-room a little later––B-19 in the old wing of the hospital, facing the mountains––when there came a rap on the half-open door. She went forward to take the medicine from the messenger and saw, standing before her in the hall, de Spain.
She shrank back as if struck. She tried to speak. Her tongue refused its office. De Spain held a package out in his hand. “Doctor Torpy asked me to give you this.”
“Doctor Torpy? What is it?”