Nan of Music Mountain. Spearman Frank Hamilton
gateway. For a few minutes it looked an even break between pursuers and pursued. The two men in the foot-hills now had a long angle to overcome, but they were doing a better pace than those of the Gap party behind, and half-way to the canyon it looked like a neck-and-neck heat for the narrow entrance. Lefever complained of the effort of keeping up, and at length reined in his horse. “Drop me here on the alkali, boys,” he cried to the others. “I’ll hold this end while you get through the canyon.”
“No,” declared de Spain, checking his pace. “If one stays, all stay. This is as good a time as any to find out what these fellows mean.”
“But not a very good place,” commented Scott, as they slowed, looking for a depression.
“It’s as good for us as it is for them,” returned de Spain abruptly. “We’ll try it right here.”
He swung out of his saddle, Lefever and Scott after an instant’s reconnoissance following. Sassoon they dismounted. Scott lashed his wrists together, while de Spain and Lefever unslung their carbines, got their horses down, and, facing the west and south, spread themselves on the ground.
The men behind lost nothing of the defensive movement of the pursued party, and slowed up in turn. For the moment the flankers were out of sight, but they must soon appear on the crest of a rise between them and the canyon. Lefever was first down and first ready with his rifle to cover the men behind. These now spread out and came on, as if for a rush.
Lefever, picking Logan, the foremost, sent a warning shot in front of him. De Spain fired almost at the same moment toward the big man making a détour to the right of the leader. The two bullets puffed in the distant alkali, and the two horsemen, sharply admonished, swerved backward precipitately. After a momentary circling indecision, the three rode closer together for a conference, dismounted, and opened a return fire on the little party lying to.
The strategy of their halt and their firing was not hard to penetrate. The men from the foot-hills were still riding for the canyon. No views were exchanged among Sassoon’s captors, but all understood that this move must be stopped. Lefever and Scott, without words, merely left the problem to de Spain as the leader. He lay on the right of the line as they faced south, and this brought him nearest to the riders out of the foot-hills. Taking advantage of a lull in the firing, he pulled his horse around between himself and the attacking party, and in such a position that he could command with his rifle the fast-moving riders to the west.
Something of a predicament confronted him. He was loath to take a human life in the effort to get a cutthroat jailed, and hated even to cripple a beast for it, but the two men must be stopped. Nor was it easy to pick up the range offhand, but meaning that the Morgans, if they were Morgans, should understand how a rush would be met, he sent one shot after another, short, beyond, and ahead of the horsemen, to check them, and to feel the way for closer shooting if it should be necessary. The two dashed on undaunted. De Spain perceived that warnings were wasted. He lowered his sights, and, waiting his chance as the leader of the foot-hill pursuers rode into a favorable range, he fired for his horse’s head. The beast jumped convulsively and pitched forward, head down in a half somersault, throwing his rider violently to the ground. Scott and Lefever yelled loudly.
Out of the cloud of dust the man scrambled to his feet, looked coolly around, and brushed the alkali disgustedly from his eyes just as a second bullet from de Spain tore up the earth a few feet to one side of him. He jumped like a rabbit at this summons, and did not even make a further pretense at composure. Grabbing his hat from the ground, he ran like mad toward the hills. Meantime his mounted companion had turned about. De Spain sprang to his feet, jerked up his horse and cried: “Now for the canyon!” Pushing Sassoon into the saddle and profiting by the confusion, the railroad men rode hard for their refuge, and reached it without more molestation than an occasional shot from their distant pursuers on the main trail. De Spain and his scouts now felt assured of their escape. The foot-hills contingent was left far behind, and, though their remaining pursuers rode in at times with a show of rushing, the chase was a stern one, and could be checked whenever necessary. Halting at times in this way to breathe their horses, or to hold off the rear pursuit, de Spain with his two companions and their prisoner rode into Sleepy Cat, locked Sassoon up, and went to the Mountain House for breakfast.
CHAPTER VII
MAINTAINING A REPUTATION
The abduction of Sassoon, which signalized de Spain’s entry into the stage-line management, created a sensation akin to the exploding of a bomb under the range. The whole mountain country, which concentrates, sensibly, on but one topic at a time, talked for a week of nothing else. No such defiance of the traditions of the Morgan rule along the reaches of the Spanish Sinks had been attempted in years–and it was recalled more than once, when de Spain’s feat was discussed at the ranches, on the trails, and in the haunts of gunmen in Calabasas, that no one of those who had ever braved the wrath of the Sink rulers had lived indefinitely to boast of it.
Experienced men, therefore, in the high country–men of that class who, wherever found, are old in the ways of the world, and not promptly moved by new or youthful adventure–dismissed the incident after hearing the details, with the comment or the conclusion that there would hardly be for de Spain more than one additional chapter to the story, and that this would be a short one. The most active Morgans–Gale, Duke, and the easy-going Satterlee–were indeed wrought to the keenest pitch of revengeful anger. No question of the right or wrong of the arrest was discussed–justification was not considered. It was an overwhelmingly insolent invasion–and worst of all, a successful invasion, by one who had nothing but cool impudence, not even a budding reputation to justify his assault on the lifelong prestige of the Gap clan. Gale Morgan strode and rode the streets of Sleepy Cat looking for de Spain, and storming.
De Spain himself, somewhat surprised at the storm he had kicked up, heeded the counsel of Scott, and while the acute stage of the resentment raged along the trail he ran down for a few days to Medicine Bend to buy horses. Both Gale and Duke Morgan proclaimed, in certain public places in Sleepy Cat, their intention of shooting de Spain on sight; and as a climax to all the excitement of the week following his capture, the slippery Sassoon broke jail and, after a brief interval, appeared at large in Calabasas.
This feat of the Morgan satellite made a loud laugh at de Spain’s expense. It mitigated somewhat the humiliation of Sassoon’s friends, but it in no wise diminished their expressed resolve to punish de Spain’s invasion. Lefever, who as the mixer among the stage men, kept close to the drift of public sentiment, decided after de Spain’s return to Sleepy Cat that the stage-line authorities had gained nothing by Sassoon’s capture.
“We ought to have thought of it before, Henry,” he said frankly one night in Jeffries’s office, “but we didn’t think.”
“Meaning just what, John?” demanded de Spain without real interest.
“Meaning, that in this country you can’t begin on a play like pulling Sassoon out from under his friends’ noses without keeping up the pace–without a second and third act. You dragged Sassoon by his hair out of the Gap; good. You surprised everybody; good. But you can’t very well stop at that, Henry. You have raised hopes, you have led people to invest you with the faint glimmerings of a reputation. I say, the glimmerings, because such a feat by itself doesn’t insure a permanent reputation, Henry. It is, so to say, merely a ‘demand’ reputation–one that men reserve the right to recall at any moment. And the worst of it is, if they ever do recall it, you are worse off than when before they extended the brittle bauble to you.”
“Jingo, John! For a stage blacksmith you are some spieler.” De Spain added an impatient, not to say contumelious exclamation concerning the substance of Lefever’s talk. “I didn’t ask them for a reputation. This man interfered with my guard–in fact, tried to cut his throat, didn’t he?”
“Would have done it if Frank had been an honest man.”
“That is all there is to it, isn’t it? If Sassoon or anybody else gets in the way of the stages, I’ll go after them again–that’s all there is to it, isn’t it?”
Lefever tapped the second finger of one fat hand gently on the table. “Practically; practically all, Henry, yes. You don’t