Nan of Music Mountain. Spearman Frank Hamilton
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 what I should think–if I had to think: Henry de Spain has never found out rightly who was responsible for the death of his father. He expects to do it, sometime; and he thinks sometime he’s going to find out right there in Medicine Bend.”
While they were talking the train was pulling out for Medicine Bend with de Spain on board.
It was a tedious ride, and de Spain was much too engaged with his thoughts to sleep. The Morgans were in his head, and he could not be rid of them. He recalled having been told that long ago some of these same Morgans lived on the Peace River above his father’s ranch. Every story he had ever heard of their wild lives, for they were men sudden in quarrel and reckless of sequel, came back to his mind. He wondered what sort of a young girl this could be who lived among them–who could live among them–and be what she seemed at a glance to be–a fawn among mountain-wolves.
It was late when he reached Medicine Bend, and raining–a dismal kind of a night. Instead of going to his room, just across the street from the station, he went up-stairs and sat down with the train-despatchers. After an hour of indecision, marked by alternative fits of making up and unmaking his mind, he went, instead of going to bed, into the telegraph-room, where black-haired Dick Grady sat at a key.
“How about the fight to-night at Sleepy Cat?” Grady asked at once.
“What fight?” demanded de Spain perfunctorily.
“The Calabasas gang got to going again up there to-night. They say one of the Morgans was in it. Some town, that Sleepy Cat, eh, Henry?”
“What Morgan was in it?”
“Gale Morgan. A lot of stuff came in on it an hour ago. Was there anything started when you left?”
“I didn’t hear of anything,” responded de Spain. But his indifference to the subject was marked.
“What’s the matter?” demanded the operator. “Aren’t you well to-night?”
“Perfectly.”
“Sleepy?”
De Spain roused himself. “Dick, have you got a Sleepy Cat wire open?”
“What do you want?”
“Tell Jeffries I’ll take that Thief River stage job.”
CHAPTER III
THE SPANISH SINKS
From a car window at Sleepy Cat may be seen, stretching far down into the southwest a chain of towering peaks, usually snow-clad, that dominate the desert in every direction for almost a hundred miles. In two extended groups, separated by a narrow but well-defined break, they constitute a magnificent rampart, named by Spaniards the Superstition Mountains, and they stretch beyond the horizon to the south, along the vast depression known locally as the Spanish Sinks. The break on the eastern side of the chain comes about twenty miles southwest of Sleepy Cat, and is marked on the north by the most striking, and in some respects most majestic peak in the range–Music Mountain; the break itself has taken the name of its earliest white settlers, and is called Morgan’s Gap. No railroad has ever yet penetrated this southern country, despite the fact that rich mines have been opened along these mountains, and are still being opened; but it lies to-day in much of the condition of primitive savagery, and lawlessness, as the word is conventionally accepted, that obtained when the first rush was made for the Thief River gold-fields.
It is not to be understood that law is an unknown equation between Calabasas and Thief River, or even between Calabasas and Sleepy Cat. But as statute law it suffers so many infractions as to be hardly recognizable in the ordinary sense. Business is done in this country; but business must halt everywhere with its means of communication, and in the Music Mountain country it still rests on the facilities of a stage line. The stage line is a big and vigorous affair, a perfectly organized railroad adjunct with the best horses, the best wagons, the best freighting outfits that money can supply.
But this is by no means, in its civilizing effect, a railroad. A railroad drives lawlessness before it–the Music Mountain country still leans on stage-line law. The bullion wagons still travel the difficult roads. They look for safety to their armed horsemen; the four and six horse stages look to the armed guard, the wayfarer must look to his horse–and it should be a good one; the mountain rancher to his rifle, the cattle thief to the moonless night, the bandit to his wits, the gunman to his holster: these include practically all of the people that travel the Spanish Sinks, except the Morgans and the Mormons. The Mormons looked to the Morgans for safety; the Morgans to themselves.
For many a year the Morgans have been almost overlords of the Music Mountain country. They own, or have laid claim to, an extended territory in the mountains, a Spanish grant. One of the first mountain Morgans married a Spanish girl, and during the early days, when the Morgans were not fighting some one out of court, they were fighting some one in court on their endless and involved titles.
But whether they won domain in lawsuit or lost it, one pearl of their holdings they never submitted to the jurisdiction of any tribunal other than their own arms. Morgan’s Gap opens south of Music Mountain, less than ten miles west of Calabasas. It is a narrow valley where valleys are more precious than water–for the mountain valley means water–and this in a country where water is much more precious than life. And some of the best of this land at the foot of Music Mountain was the maternal inheritance of Nan Morgan.
At Calabasas the Thief River stage line maintains completely equipped relay barns. They are over twenty miles from Sleepy Cat, but nearly fifty the other way from Thief River. The unequal division is not due to what was desirable when the route was laid out, but to the limit of what man could do in the never-conquered desert. This supplies at Calabasas a spring, to tempt the unwary traveller still farther within its clutches. A large number of horses are kept at Calabasas, and the barn crews are quartered there in a company barrack. Along the low ridges and in the shallow depressions about Calabasas Spring there are a very few widely separated shacks, once built by freighters and occupied by squatter outlaws to be within reach of water. This gives the vicinity something of the appearance of a poorly sustained prairie-dog town. And except these shacks, there is nothing between Calabasas, Thief River, and the mountains except sunshine and alkali. I say nothing, meaning especially nothing, in the way of a human habitation.
But there is a queer inn at Calabasas. A pioneer Thief River prospector, mad with thirst, fought his way across the Sinks to the Calabasas Spring, and wandered thence one day into Sleepy Cat. In a delirium of gratitude he ordered built at Calabasas what he termed a hotel, to provide at that forbidden oasis for the luxurious comfort of future thirst-mad wanderers. It was built of lumber hauled a thousand miles, and equipped with luxuries brought three thousand–a fearsome, rambling structure, big enough for all the prospectors in the Rocky Mountains.
Having