“It’s a man’s job,” returned Scott, reflecting, “but it could be done.”
“If a man thought it necessary.”
“If he knew you by sight,” responded Scott unmoved, “he might have thought it necessary.”
Undeterred by his failure to overtake the fugitive, de Spain rode rapidly back to town to look for other clews. Nothing further was found to throw light on the message or messenger. No one had been found anywhere in town from Morgan’s 318 Gap; whoever had taken a chance in delivering the message had escaped undetected.
Even after the search had been abandoned the significance of the incident remained to be weighed. De Spain was much upset. A conference with Scott, whose judgment in any affair was marked by good sense, and with Lefever, who, like a woman, reached by intuition a conclusion at which Scott or de Spain arrived by process of thought, only revealed the fact that all three, as Lefever confessed, were nonplussed.
“It’s one of two things,” declared Lefever, whose eyes were never dulled by late hours. “Either they’ve sent this to lure you into the Gap and ‘get’ you, or else––and that’s a great big ‘or else’––she needs you. Henry, did that message––I mean the way it was worded––sound like Nan Morgan?”
De Spain could hardly answer. “It did, and it didn’t,” he said finally. “But––” his companions saw during the pause by which his lips expressed the resolve he had finally reached that he was not likely to be turned from it––“I am going to act just as if the word came from Nan and she does need me.”
More than one scheme for getting quickly into touch with Nan was proposed and rejected within the next ten minutes. And when Lefever, after 319 conferring with Scott, put up to de Spain a proposal that the three should ride into the Gap together and demand Nan at the hands of Duke Morgan, de Spain had reached another conclusion.
“I know you are willing to take more than your share, John, of any game I play. In the first place it isn’t right to take you and Bob in where I am going on my own personal affair. And I know Nan wouldn’t enjoy the prospect of an all-around fight on her account. Fighting is a horror to that girl. I’ve got her feelings to think about as well as my own. I’ve decided what to do, John. I’m going in alone.”
“You’re going in alone!”