Nan of Music Mountain | Page 8

five in the company.
Three of the men were riding abreast and a little ahead. Of these, the
middle horseman was a spare man of forty years, with a black military
hat, and a frankly disreputable air. His face was drawn up into a
one-sided smile, marked by a deep, vertical wrinkle running up, close
to his nose, from the corner of his mouth almost to the inner corner of
his eye. Satt Morgan's smile was habitual and lessened his stern aspect.
At his right rode his cousin, Duke Morgan, older, shorter, and stouter.
His square, heavy-jawed, smooth-shaven face was lighted by hard,
keen eyes, and finished by an uncompromising chin. Duke was the real
head of the clan, of which there were numerous branches in the
Superstition Mountains, all looking with friendliness or enmity to the
Morgans of Morgan's Gap.
The yellow-haired man riding on the left, with a red face and red-lidded,
squinting eyes, was in stature something between the two Morgans, and
about the age of the elder cousin. His shoulders slouched, and he
showed none of the blood of his companions. But this man, David
Sassoon, the Calabasas gambler, quondam cowboy, and chronic
brawler, stood in some way close to the different Morgans, and was
reputed to have got each of them, at different times, out of more than
one troublesome affair, either by sheer force of arms, or through his
resourceful cunning.
These men were followed by a younger man riding with a very young
woman. De Spain knew none of the front-rank men, but he knew well
Nan Morgan and her dancing partner.

They were talking together, and Nan seemed from her manner at odds
with her companion. He appeared to be trying to laugh the situation off
when he caught sight of de Spain pausing for them to pass. Gale's face
lighted as he set eyes on him, and he spoke quickly to Nan. De Spain
could not at first hear his words, but he needed no ears to interpret his
laugh and the expression on his face. Nan, persistently importuned,
looked around. She saw de Spain, much closer, it would seem, than she
had expected to see a man looking directly at her, and her eyes rested
on him only a moment. The substance of her cousin's words she
apparently had not caught, and he repeated them in a louder voice:
"There's your handsome Medicine Bend gunman!"
Nan, glancing again toward de Spain, seemed aware that he heard. She
looked away. De Spain tightened up with a rage. The blood rushed to
his face, the sarcasm struck in. If the birthmark could have deepened
with humiliation it would have done so at the instant of the cold
inspection of the girl's pretty eyes. But he cared less for Nan's
inspection, cold as it was, than for the jibe of her satisfied cousin. Not
content, Gale, calling ahead to the others, invited their at tention to the
man on the street corner. De Spain felt minded to hurl an insult at them
in a body. It would have been four to one rather awkward odds even if
they were mounted and there was a woman. But he only stood still,
returning their inspection as insolently as silence could. Each face was
faithfully photographed and filed in his memory, and his steady gaze
followed them until they rode down the hill and clattered jauntily out
on the swaying suspension bridge that still crosses the Rat River at
Grant Street, and connects the whole south country the Spanish Sinks,
the Thief River gold-fields, the saw-toothed Superstition Range,
Morgan's Gap, and Music Mountain with Sleepy Cat and the railroad.
De Spain, walking down Grant Street, watched the party disappear
among the hills across the river. The encounter had stirred him. He
already hated the Morgans, at least all except the blue-eyed girl, and
she, it was not difficult to divine from her expression, was, at least,
disdainful of her morning rival.
Reaching the station platform while still busy with his thoughts, de

Spain encountered Jeffries and Lefever.
"When are you coming up to take my job, Henry?" demanded the
superintendent without any parley.
"I am not coming up," announced de Spain bluntly.
"Not coming up, eh? All right, we'll find somebody that will come up,"
retorted Jeffries. "John," he added, "wire Medicine Bend to send Farrell
Kennedy here in the morning to see me."
"What's the reason that fellow sticks so close to Medicine Bend?"
demanded Jeffries, when Lefever joined him later in his office.
"Don't ask me," frowned Lefever perplexed. "Don't ask me. Henry is
odd in some ways. You can't tell what's going on inside that fellow's
head by looking at the outside of it." Jeffries grunted coldly at this bit
of wisdom. "I'll tell you