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Updated: May 7, 2025
"I was born with my beauty-mark just as you were born with your damned bad manners," he added composedly, for in hugging up to him his enemies were playing his game. "You can't help it, neither can I," he went on. "Somebody is bound to pay for putting that mark on me. Somebody is bound to pay for your manners. Why talk about either? Sassoon, set out for your friends or I will.
They saw the man coming on behind stop his horse and lean forward, his head bent over the trail. He was examining the sand and halted quite a minute to study something. Both knew what he was studying the hoof-prints of Nan's pony heading toward the lava. Nan shrank back and with de Spain moved a little to where they could watch the intruder without being seen. Nan whispered first: "It's Sassoon."
"I thought you was entitled to know," he said finally, "now that Sassoon will never talk any more." De Spain moistened his lips. When he spoke his voice was cracked and harsh, as if with what he had heard he had suddenly grown old. "You are right, Pardaloe. I thank you. I when I in the morning. Pardaloe, for the present, go back to the Gap. I will talk with Wickwire to-morrow."
At the mere appearance of his frail and motionless foe a feeling of awkward helplessness dissolved his easy confidence. He now reversed every move he had so carefully made with his hands and, resentfully eying Nan, rode in somewhat behind Sassoon, doing nothing further than to pull his kerchief up about his neck, and wondering what would be likely to happen before the next three minutes were up.
"Where you left it." "How?" She was silent. "When?" "To-night." "Have you been to Calabasas and back to-night?" "Everybody but Sassoon is in the chase," she replied uneasily as if not knowing what to say, or how to say it. "They said you should never leave the Gap alive they are ready with traps everywhere. I didn't know what to do.
Bob Scott, who knew the recess well, repeated his explicit directions as to how de Spain was to reach Sassoon's shack. He repeated his description of its interior, told him where the bed stood, and even where Sassoon ordinarily kept his knife and his revolver.
All the trouble that ever come 'tween you and me come by an accident come before you was born, and come through Dave Sassoon, and he's held it over me ever since you come up into this country. I was a young fellow. Sassoon worked for my father. The cattle and sheep war was on, north of Medicine Bend. The Peace River sheepmen raided our place your father was with them.
Nan, needing no instructions for the emergency, took the lines of the horses, and de Spain, standing beside his own horse, reached his right hand over in front of the pommel and, regarding Sassoon all the while, drew his rifle slowly from its scabbard. The blood fled Nan's cheeks. She said nothing.
In the street a few minutes later, de Spain and Lefever encountered Scott, who, with his back hunched up, his cheap black hat pulled well down over his ears, his hands in his trousers pockets and his thin coat collar modestly turned against the drizzling rain, was walking across the parkway from the station. "Sassoon is in town," exclaimed Lefever with certainty after he had told the story.
De Spain, lying on his side, his head resting on his elbow, and his hands clasped at the back of his neck, meditated first on how he should capture Sassoon at daybreak, and then on Nan Morgan and her mountain home, into which he was about to break to drag out a criminal. Sassoon and his malice soon drifted out of his mind, but Nan remained.
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