Giving this information time to sink in, McAlpin continued. Nan’s eyes had turned, despite her indifference, to the coat; but she was thinking more intently about the belt which McAlpin asserted hung under it. “You want to know what he did go down to the hotel for that afternoon? I happen to know that, too,” averred McAlpin, sitting down, but respectfully, on the edge of the chair. “First I want to say this: I worked for your Uncle Duke five years.”
He paused to give Nan a chance to dispute the statement if she so desired. Then taking her despairing silence as an indorsement of his position in giving her a confidence, he went on: “Henry de Spain is dead,” he said quietly. She eyed him without so much as winking. “I wouldn’t tell it if he wasn’t. Some of the boys don’t believe he is. I’m not a pessimist––not a bit––but I’m telling you it’s a physical impossibility for a man to take the fire of four revolvers in the hands of four men like those four men, at arm’s length, and live. Henry de Spain is the cleverest man with a gun that ever rode the Spanish Sinks, but limits is limits; the boy’s dead. And he was always talking about you. It’s God’s truth, and since he’s dead it harms no one to tell it to you, though I’d never breathe it to another. He was fairly gone on you. Now 179 that’s the fair truth: the man was gone on you. I knowed it, where others didn’t know it. I was the only one he could always ask about whether you’d been here, and when; and when you might be expected coming again––and all such things like that.
“You don’t have to knock me down, Miss Nan, to put me wise about a man’s being keen on a girl. I’m a married man,” declared McAlpin with modest pride. “He thought all the time he was fooling me, and keeping covered. Why, I laughed to myself at his tricks to get information without letting on! Now, that afternoon he came in here kind of moody. It was an anniversary for him, and a hard one––the day his father was shot from ambush––a good many years ago, but nary one of us had forgot it. Then he happened to see your pony––this same pony you’re riding to-day––a-standing back there in the box-stall. He asked me whose it was; and he asked me about you, and, by jinx! the way he perked up when I told him you were coming in on the stage that afternoon! When he heard you’d been sick, he was for going down to the hotel to get a cup of coffee––for you!” McAlpin, like any good story-teller, was already on his feet again. “He did it,” he exclaimed, “and you know what he got when he stepped into the barroom.” 180 He took hold of de Spain’s coat and held it aside to enter his exhibit. “There,” he concluded, “is his cartridge-belt, hanging there yet. The boy is dead––why shouldn’t I tell you?”
Nan rode home much more excited, more bewildered than when she had ridden over. What should she do? It was already pretty clear to her that de Spain had not ridden unarmed to where she found him to ambush any of the Morgans. He was not dead; but he was not far from it if McAlpin was right and if she could credit her own senses in looking at him. What ought she to do?
Other things McAlpin had said crowded her thoughts. Strangest shock of all that this man of all other men should profess to care for her. She had shown anger when McAlpin dared speak of it; at least, she thought she had. And she still did not know how, sufficiently, to resent the thought of such audacity on de Spain’s part; but recalling all she could of his words and actions, she was forced to confess to herself that McAlpin’s assertions were confirmed in them––and that what McAlpin had said interpreted de Spain’s unvarying attitude toward her. This was, to say the least, a further awkward complication for her feelings. She already had enough to confuse them.
CHAPTER XIV
NAN DRIFTS
Without going in to speak to Gale, whom Bull Page, his nurse, reported very cross but not hurt much, Nan left her packet for him and rode home. Her uncle Duke was in town. She had the house to herself, with only Bonita, the old Mexican serving-woman, and Nan ate her late supper alone.