In a lifetime of years there can come to the greater part of us but a few days, a few hours, sometimes no more than a single moment, to show 428 of what stuff we are really made. Such a crisis came that day to Nan. Already she had been wheeled more than once into de Spain’s room, to sit where she could help to woo him back to life. The chief surgeon, in the morning, told Nan of the decision. In her hospital bed she rose bolt upright. “No!” she declared solemnly. “You shan’t take his arm off!”
The surgeon met her rebellion tactfully. But he told Nan, at last, that de Spain must lose either his arm or his life. “No,” she repeated without hesitation and without blanching, “you shan’t take off his arm. He shan’t lose his life.”
The blood surged into her cheeks––better blood and redder than the doctors had been able to bring there––such blood as de Spain alone could call into them. Nan, with her nurse’s help, dressed, joined de Spain, and talked long and earnestly. The doctors, too, laid the situation before him. When they asked him for his decision, he nodded toward Nan. “She will tell you, gentlemen, what we’ll do.”
And Nan did tell them what the two who had most at stake in the decision would do. Any man could have done as much as that. But Nan did more. She set herself out to save the arm and patient both, and, lest the doctors should change their tactics and move together on the 429 arm surreptitiously, Nan stayed night and day with de Spain, until he was able to make such active use of either arm as to convince her that he, and not the surgeons, would soon need the most watching.
Afterward when Nan, in some doubt, asked the chaplain whether she was married or single, he obligingly offered to ratify and confirm the desert ceremony.
This affair was the occasion for an extraordinary round-up at Sleepy Cat. Two long-hostile elements––the stage and railroad men and the Calabasas-Morgan Gap contingent of mountain-men, for once at least, fraternized. Warrants were pigeonholed, suspicion suspended, side-arms neglected in their scabbards. The fighting men of both camps, in the presence of a ceremony that united de Spain and Nan Morgan, could not but feel a generous elation. Each party considered that it was contributing to the festivity in the bride and the groom the very best each could boast, and no false note disturbed the harmony of the notable day.
Gale Morgan, having given up the fight, had left the country. Satterlee Morgan danced till all the platforms in town gave way. John Lefever attended the groom, and Duke Morgan sternly, but without compunction, gave the bride. 430 From Medicine Bend, Farrell Kennedy brought a notable company of de Spain’s early associates for the event. It included Whispering Smith, whose visit to Sleepy Cat on this occasion was the first in years; George McCloud, who had come all the way from Omaha to join his early comrades in arms; Wickwire, who had lost none of his taciturn bluntness––and so many train-despatchers that the service on the division was crippled for the entire day.
A great company of self-appointed retainers gathered together from over all the country, rode behind the gayly decorated bridal-coach in procession from the church to Jeffries’s house, where the feasts had been prepared. During the reception a modest man, dragged from an obscure corner among the guests, was made to take his place next Lefever on the receiving-line. It was Bob Scott, and he looked most uncomfortable until he found a chance to slip unobserved back to the side of the room where the distinguished Medicine Bend contingent, together with McAlpin, Pardaloe, Elpaso, and Bull Page, slightly unsteady, but extremely serious for the grave occasion, appeared vastly uncomfortable together.
The railroad has not yet been built across the Sinks to Thief River. But only those who lived 431 in Sleepy Cat in its really wild stage days are entitled to call themselves early settlers, or to tell stories more or less authentic about what then happened. The greater number of the Old Guard of that day, as cankering peace gradually reasserted itself along the Sinks, turned from the stage coach to the railroad coach; some of them may yet be met on the trains in the mountain country. Wherever you happen to find such a one, he will tell you of the days when Superintendent de Spain of the Western Division wore a gun in the mountains and used it, when necessary, on his wife’s relations.