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Toward night we got in sight of the ranch-house. We saw a man down at the corral. 'That's Jennings, Sassoon says. I never laid eyes on him before I never laid eyes on your father before. Both of us fired. Next day we heard your father was killed, and Jennings had left the country. Sassoon or I, one of us, killed your father, de Spain.
Nan stood with her back against the end of the table where her uncle's first words had stopped her, and she looked sidewise toward her cousin. In her answer he heard as much contempt as a girl's voice could carry to a rejected lover. "So you've turned sneak!" Gale roared a string of bad words. "You hire that coyote, Sassoon, to spy for you, do you?" demanded Nan coolly.
The peculiar glazed black headdress of the Parsee and the silk kerchief of the Burman in turn indicated the racial catholicity of the assembly in which Sir Sassoon David, of Bombay, worthily represents, by his authority as a financier, the small Jewish community of India.
With a sudden, low command to Sassoon to check his horse, and without a movement that could be detected in the dawn ten yards away, de Spain with the thumb and finger of his right hand lifted his revolver from its scabbard, shifted his lines from his left hand to his right, rode closer to Sassoon and pressed the muzzle of the gun to his prisoner's side.
Then the door behind the bar slowly opened, and the scar-featured face of Sassoon peered cautiously from the gloom. The horse thief, stooping, walked in with a leer directed triumphantly at the railroad man. If it were possible to deepen it, the sinister spot on de Spain's face darkened. Something in his blood raged at the sight of the malevolent face. He glanced at Logan.
He let me into the kitchen after my coaxing for a cup of coffee he's an ornery, cold-blooded guy, that Pardaloe. Old Duke and Sassoon think the sun rises and sets on the top of his head funny, ain't it?" De Spain made no comment. "Whilst I was drinking my coffee " "Who gave it to you?" "Old Bunny, the Mex.
He was apparently the only man at Calabasas that hoped for such a thing, and certainly the only one so rash as to fight for it yet he always did. A dispute on this occasion found him without a friend in the room. Sassoon reached for him with a knife. McAlpin was the first to get the news at the barn.
"Telephone Sleepy Cat for a substitute. Suppose we go back, get something to eat, and you two ride singly over toward the Gap this afternoon; lie outside under cover to see whether Sassoon or his friends leave before night there's only one way out of the place, they tell me. Then I will join you, and we'll ride in before daylight, and perhaps catch him while everybody is asleep."
Sassoon, however, owing to the indignity now put upon him, also nourished a particular grievance against the meditative guard, and his was one not tempered either by prudence or calculation. His chance came one night when Elpaso had unwisely allowed himself to be drawn into a card game at Calabasas Inn. Elpaso was notoriously a stickler for a square deal at cards.
But de Spain could be extremely blunt, and in the parting shots between the two he gave no ground. "Jeffries put me here to stop this kind of rowdyism on the stages," he said to Lefever on their way back to the barn. "This is a good time to begin. And Sassoon and Gale Morgan are good men to begin with," he added.
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