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I suppose you know," continued Lefever, in as well-modulated a tone as he could assume to convey information that could not be regarded as wholly cheerful, "that they expect to get you for this Sassoon job." De Spain flushed. But the red anger lasted only a moment. "Who are 'they'?" he asked after a pause. "Deaf Sandusky, Logan, of course, the Calabasas bunch, and the Morgans."
"If this was Henry de Spain," muttered Elpaso, when Lefever rejoined his companions, "he won't care whether you join him now, or at ten o'clock, or never." "That is not Henry," asserted Lefever with his usual cheer. "Not within forty rows of apple-trees. It's not Henry's gun, not Henry's heels, not Henry's hair, and thereby, not Henry's head that was hit that time.
The sole promise Carpy would make concerning him was that he would fit him up either for trial, or for his museum or, as Lefever suggested, for both. The excitement of the town lay in the pursuit of Van Horn. Laramie during the first uncertain days of her father's condition stayed within Kate's call.
But once before the door, with Lefever close at hand, he pounded the cracked panels till the windows shook. Some time elapsed before there was any response. The pounding continued till a flickering light appeared at a window. There was an ill-natured colloquy, a delay, more impatience, and at length the landlord reluctantly opened the door. He held in his hand an oil-lamp.
With the first peep of dawn, and with his men facing him in their saddles, Lefever made a short explanation. "I don't want any man to go into the Gap with me this morning under any misunderstanding or any false pretense," he began cheerfully. "Bob Scott and Bull will stay right here.
De Spain, regarding him undisturbed, answered after a little pause: "Elpaso told me he put a man off his stage last week for fighting." "No," contradicted Morgan loudly, "not for fighting. Elpaso was drunk." "What's the name of the man Elpaso put off, John?" asked de Spain, looking at Lefever. Morgan hooked his thumb toward the man standing at his side. "Here's the man right here, Dave Sassoon."
The intractable mountaineer, with his refusal to accept the olive-branch, blew Bob out of the room. Nan was crushed by the result, but de Spain was not to be dismayed. Lefever came to him the day after Nan had got her uncle home. "Henry," he began without any preliminaries, "there is one thing about your precipitate ride up Music Mountain that I never got clear in my mind.
Lefever took de Spain in to the bar, showed him the open sash, and pointed to the heel-prints. De Spain stepped through the window, Lefever following. An examination showed the slide of a spur-rowel behind one heel-mark and indications of a hasty jump. While they bent over the signs that seemed to connect their quarry with the place, a door opened across the courtyard, and Pedro appeared.
Fairly accurate reports accounted for Gale Morgan, nursing a wound at home, and for Sassoon, badly wounded and under cover somewhere in the Gap. Beyond this, information halted. Toward the end of the week a Mexican sheep-herder brought word in to Lefever that he had seen in Duke Morgan's stable, Sassoon's horse the one on which de Spain had escaped.
Ben was a derelict of the range, a stray whose appeal could be only to patient men. Whenever he wandered into the Falling Wall country, where he had a claim, he made Laramie's cabin a sort of headquarters and spent weeks at a time there, looking after the stock in return for what John Lefever termed the "court'sies" of the ranch. Laramie, greeting Ben, made casual inquiry about the stock.
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