De Spain opened his eyes to wander from one to the other of the faces. He half rose up, struggling in a frenzy with the hands that restrained him. While his companions pleaded to quiet him, he fought them until, restored to its seat of reason, his mind reasserted itself and, lying exhausted, he told them in his exquisite torture of whom he had left, and what must be done to find and bring them in.
While the relief wagons, equipped with straining teams and flanked by veteran horsemen, were dashing out of the barn, he lapsed into unconsciousness. But he had been able to hold Scott’s hand long enough to tell him he must find Nan and bring her in, or never come back.
It was Scott who found her. In their gropings through the blizzard the three had wandered nearer Calabasas than any one of them dreamed. And on the open desert, far south and east of the upper lava beds, it was Scott’s horse that put a foot through the bottom of the overturned wagon box. The suspected mound of snow, with the buried horses scrambling to their feet, rose upright at the crash. Duke crouched, half-conscious, under the rude shelter. Lying where he had placed her, snugly between the horses, Scott found Nan. He spoke to her when she opened her staring eyes, picked her up in his arms, called 426 to his companions for the covered wagon, and began to restore her, without a moment of delay, to life. He even promised if she would drink the hateful draft he put to her lips and let him cut away her shoes and leggings and the big coat frozen on her, that in less than an hour she should see Henry de Spain alive and well.
CHAPTER XXXIV
AT SLEEPY CAT
Nothing in nature, not even the storm itself, is so cruel as the beauty of the after calm. In the radiance of the sunshine next day de Spain, delirious and muttering, was taken to the hospital at Sleepy Cat. In an adjoining room lay Nan, moaning reproaches at those who were torturing her reluctantly back to life. Day and night the doctors worked over the three. The town, the division, the stagemen, and the mountain-men watched the outcome of the struggle. From as far as Medicine Bend railroad surgeons came to aid in the fight.
De Spain cost the most acute anxiety. The crux of the battle, after the three lives were held safe, centred on the effort to save de Spain’s arm––the one he had chosen to lose, if he must lose one, when he strapped it to the whiffletree. The day the surgeons agreed that if his life were to be saved the arm must come off at the shoulder a gloom fell on the community.