De Spain opened it with acute misgivings. Hardly able to believe his eyes, he slowly read:
Dearest:
A wild hope has come to me. Perhaps we don’t know the truth of this terrible story as it really is. Suppose we should be condemning poor Uncle Duke without having the real facts? Sassoon was a wretch, Henry, if ever one lived––a curse to every one. What purpose he could serve by repeating this story, which he must have kept very secret till now, I don’t know; but there was some reason. I must know the whole truth––I feel that I, alone, can get hold of it, and that you would approve what I am doing if you were here with me in this little room, where I am writing at daybreak, to show you my heart.
Long before you get this I shall be speeding toward the Gap. I am going to Uncle Duke to get from him the exact truth. Uncle Duke is breaking––has broken––and now that the very worst has come, and we must face it, he will tell me what I ask. Whether I can get him to repeat this to you, to come to you, to throw himself on your pity, my dearest one, I don’t know. But it is for this I am going to try, and for this I beg of your love––the love of which I have been so proud!––that you will let me stay with him until I at least learn everything and can bring the whole story to you. If I can bring him, I will.
And I shall be safe with him––perfectly safe. Gale has been driven away. Pardaloe, I know I can trust, and he will be under the roof with me. Please, do not try to come to me. It might ruin everything. Only forgive me, and I shall be back with what I hope for, or what I fear, very, very soon. Not till then can I bear to look into your eyes. You have a better right than anyone in the world to know the whole truth, cost what it may. Be patient for only a little while with
Nan.
It was Jeffries who said, afterward, he hoped never again to be the bearer of a letter such as that. Never until he had read and grasped the contents of Nan’s note had Jeffries seen the bundle of resource and nerve and sinew, that men called Henry de Spain, go to pieces. For once, trouble overbore him.
When he was able to speak he told Jeffries everything. “It is my fault,” he said hopelessly. “I was so crippled, so stunned, she must have thought––I see it now––that I was making ready 387 to ride out by daybreak and shoot Duke down on sight. It’s the price a man must pay, Jeffries, for the ability to defend himself against this bunch of hold-up men and assassins. Because they can’t get me, I’m a ‘gunman’–––”
“No, you’re not a ‘gunman.’”
“A gunman and nothing else. That’s what everybody, friends and enemies, reckon me––a gunman. You put me here to clean out this Calabasas gang, not because of my good looks, but because I’ve been, so far, a fraction of a second quicker on a trigger than these double-damned crooks.
“I don’t get any fun out of standing for ten minutes at a time with a sixty-pound safety-valve dragging on my heart, watching a man’s eye to see whether he is going to pull a gun on me and knock me down with a slug before I can pull one and knock him down. I don’t care for that kind of thing, Jeff. Hell’s delight! I’d rather have a little ranch with a little patch of alfalfa––enough alfalfa to feed a little bunch of cattle, a hundred miles from every living soul. What I would like to do is to own a piece of land under a ten-cent ditch, and watch the wheat sprout out of the desert.”
Jeffries, from behind his pipe, regarded de Spain’s random talk calmly.
“I do feel hard over my father’s death,” he 388 went on moodily. “Who wouldn’t? If God meant me to forget it, why did he put this mark on my face, Jeff? I did talk pretty strong to Nan about it on Music Mountain. She accused me then of being a gunman. It made me hot to be set down for a gunman by her. I guess I did give it back to her too strong. That’s the trouble––my bark is worse than my bite––I’m always putting things too strong. I didn’t know when I was talking to her then that Sandusky and Logan were dead. Of course, she thought I was a butcher. But how could I help it?
“I did feel, for a long time, I’d like to kill with my own hands the man that murdered my father, Jeff. My mother must have realized that her babe, if a man-child, was doomed to a life of bloodshed. I’ve been trying to think most of the night what she’d want me to do now. I don’t know what I can do, or can’t do, when I set eyes on that old scoundrel. He’s got to tell the truth––that’s all I say now. If he lies, after what he made my mother suffer, he ought to die like a dog––no matter who he is.