CHAPTER XXVII
EL CAPITAN
The mutterings above the mountains now grew rapidly louder and while the two hovered over the fire, a thunder-squall, rolling wildly down the eastern slope, burst over the Gap. Its sudden fury put aside for a time all question of moving, and Nan’s face took on a grave expression as she looked in the firelight at her companion, thinking of how far such a storm might imperil their situation, how far cut off their already narrow chance of escape.
De Spain–reclining close beside her, looking into the depths of her eyes as the flickering blaze revealed them, drying himself in their warmth and light, eating and drinking of their presence on the mountainside alone with him, and pledged to him, his protection, and his fortunes against the world–apparently thought of nothing beyond the satisfaction of the moment. The wind drove the storm against the west side of the huge granite peak under which they were sheltered and gave them no present trouble in their slender recess. But Nan knew even better than her companion the fickle fury of a range storm, and understood uncomfortably well how a sudden shift might, at any moment, lay their entire path open to its fierceness. She warned de Spain they must be moving, and, freshened by the brief rest, they set out toward El Capitan.
Their trail lay along granite levels of comparatively good going and, fleeing from the squall, they had covered more than half the distance that separated them from the cliff, when a second thunder-storm, seeming to rush in from the desert, burst above their heads. Drenched with rain, they were forced to draw back under a projecting rock. In another moment the two storms, meeting in the Gap, crashed together. Bolt upon bolt of lightning split the falling sheets of water, and thunder, exploding in their faces, stunned and deafened them.
Mountain peaks, played on by the wild light, leaped like spectres out of the black, and granite crags, searched by blazing shafts, printed themselves in ghostly flames on the retina; thunder, searching unnumbered gorges, echoed beneath the sharper crashes in one long, unending roll, and far out beyond the mountains the flooded desert tossed on a dancing screen into the glare, rippled like a madcap sea, and flashed in countless sheets of blinding facets. As if an unseen hand had touched a thousand granite springs above the Gap, every slender crevice spouted a stream that shot foaming out from the mountainsides. The sound of moving waters rose in a dull, vast roar, broken by the unseen boom of distant falls, launching huge masses of water into caverns far below. The storm-laden wind tore and swirled among the crowded peaks, and above all the angry sky moaned and quivered in the rage of the elements.
Nan leaned within de Spain’s arm. “If this keeps up,” he said after some time, “our best play is to give up crossing to-night. We might hide somewhere on the mountain to-morrow, and try it toward evening.”
“Yes, if we have to,” she answered. But he perceived her reluctant assent. “What I am afraid of, Henry, is, if they were to find us. You know what I mean.”
“Then we won’t hide,” he replied. “The minute we get the chance we will run for it. This is too fierce to last long.”
“Oh, but it’s November!” Nan reminded him apprehensively. “It’s winter; that’s what makes it so cold. You never can tell in November.”
“It won’t last all night, anyway,” he answered with confidence.
Despite his assurance, however, it did last all night, and it was only the lulls between the sharp squalls that enabled them to cover the trail before daylight. When they paused before El Capitan the fury of the night seemed largely to have exhausted itself, but the overcharged air hung above the mountains, trembling and moaning like a bruised and stricken thing. Lightning, playing across the inky heavens, blazed in constant sheets from end to end of the horizon. Its quivering glare turned the wild night into a kind of ghastly, uncertain day. Thunder, hoarse with invective, and hurled mercilessly back and forth by the fitful wind, drew farther and farther into the recess of the mountains, only to launch its anger against its own imprisoned echoes. Under it all the two refugees, high on the mountainside, looked down on the flooding Gap.
Their flight was almost ended. Only the sheer cliff ahead blocked their descent to the aspen grove. De Spain himself had already crossed El Capitan once, and he had done it at night–but it was not, he was compelled to remind himself, on a night like this. It seemed now a madman’s venture and, without letting himself appear to do so, he watched Nan’s face as the lightning played over it, to read if he could, unsuspected, whether she still had courage for the undertaking. She regarded him so collectedly, whether answering a question or asking one, that he marvelled at her strength and purpose. Hardly a moment passed after they had started until the eastern sky lightened before the retreating storm, and with the first glimmer of daylight, the two were at the beginning of the narrow foothold which lay for half a mile between them and safety.
Here the El Capitan trail follows the face of the almost vertical wall which, rising two thousand feet in the air, fronts the gateway of Morgan’s Gap.
They started forward, de Spain ahead. There was nothing now to hurry them unduly, and everything to invite caution. The footholds were slippery, rivulets still crossed the uncertain path, and fragments of rock that had washed down on the trail, made almost every step a new hazard. The face of El Capitan presents, midway, a sharp convex. Just where it is thrown forward in this keen angle, the trail runs out almost to a knife-edge, and the mountain is so nearly vertical that it appears to overhang the floor of the valley.
They made half the stretch of this angle with hardly a misstep, but the advance for a part of the way was a climb, and de Spain, turning once to speak to Nan, asked her for her rifle, that he might carry it with his own. What their story might have been had she given it to him, none can tell. But Nan, holding back, refused to let him relieve her. The dreaded angle which had haunted de Spain all night was safely turned on hands and knees and, as they rounded it toward the east, clouds scudding over the open desert broke and shot the light of dawn against the beetling arête.
De Spain turned in some relief to point to the coming day. As he did so a gust of wind, sweeping against the sheer wall, caught him off his guard. He regained his balance, but a stone, slipping underfoot, tipped him sidewise, and he threw himself on his knees to avoid the dizzy edge. As he fell forward he threw up his hand to save his hat, and in doing so released his rifle, which lay under his hand on the rock. Before he could recover it the rifle slipped from reach. In the next instant he heard it bouncing from rock to rock, five hundred feet below.
Greatly annoyed and humiliated, he regained his feet and spoke with a laugh to reassure Nan. Just as she answered not to worry, a little singing scream struck their ears; something splashed suddenly close at hand against the rock wall; chips scattered between them. From below, the sound of a rifle report cracked against the face of the cliff. They were so startled, so completely amazed that they stood motionless. De Spain looked down and over the uneven floor of the Gap. The ranch-houses, spread like toys in the long perspective, lay peacefully revealed in the gray of the morning. Among the dark pine-trees he could discern Nan’s own home. Striving with the utmost keenness of vision to detect where the shot had come from, de Spain could discover no sign of life around any of the houses. But in another moment the little singing scream came again, the blow of the heavy slug against the splintering rock was repeated, the distant report of the rifle followed.
“Under fire,” muttered de Spain. He looked questioningly at Nan. She herself, gazing across the dizzy depths, was searching for the danger-point. A third shot followed at a seemingly regular interval–the deliberate interval needed by a painstaking marksman working out his range and taking his time to find it. De Spain watched Nan’s search anxiously. “We’d better keep moving,” he said. “Come! whoever is shooting can follow us a hundred yards either way.” In front of de Spain a fourth bullet struck the rock. “Nan,” he muttered, “I’ve got you into a fix. If we can’t stop that fellow he is liable to stop us. Can you see anything?” he asked, waiting for her to come up.
“Henry!” She was looking straight down into the valley, and laid her hand on de Spain’s shoulder. “Is there anything moving on the ridge–over there–see–just east of Sassoon’s ranch-house?”
De Spain, his eyes bent on the point Nan indicated, drew her forward to a dip in the trail which, to one stretched flat, afforded a slight protection. He made her lie down, and just beyond her refuge chose a point where the path, broadening a little and rising instead of sloping toward the outer edge, gave him a chance to brace himself between two rocks. Flattened there like a target in mid-air, he threw his hat down to Nan and, resting on one knee, waited for the shot that should tumble him down El Capitan or betray the man bent on killing him. Squalls of wind, sweeping into the Gap and sucked upward on the huge expanse of rock below, tossed his hair and ballooned his coat as he buttoned it. Another bullet, deliberately aimed, chipped the rock above him. Nan, agonizing in her suspense, cried out she must join him and go with him if he went. He steadied her apprehension and with a few words reminded her, as a riflewoman, what a gamble every shot at a height such as they occupied, and with such a wind, must be. He reminded her, too, it was much easier to shoot down than up, but all the time he was searching for the flash that should point the assassin. A bullet struck again viciously close between them. De Spain spoke slowly: “Give me your rifle.” Without turning his head he held out his hand, keeping his eyes rigidly on the suspicious spot on the ridge. “How far is it to that road, Nan?”
She looked toward the faint line that lay in the deep shadows below. “Three hundred yards.”
“Nan, if it wasn’t for you, I couldn’t travel this country at all,” he remarked with studious unconcern. “Last time I had no ammunition–this time, no rifle–you always have what’s needed. How high are we, Nan?”
“Seven hundred feet.”
“Elevate for me, Nan, will you?”
“Remember the wind,” she faltered, adjusting the sight as he had asked.
With the cautioning words she passed the burnished weapon, glittering yet with the rain-drops, into his hand. A flash came from the distant ridge. Throwing the rifle to his shoulder, de Spain covered a hardly perceptible black object on the trail midway between Sassoon’s ranch-house and a little bridge which he well remembered–he had crossed it the night he dragged Sassoon into town. It seemed a long time that he pressed the rifle back against his shoulder and held his eye along the barrel. He was wondering as he covered the crouching man with the deadly sight which of his enemies this might be. He even slipped the rifle from his shoulder and looked long and silently at the black speck before he drew the weapon back again into place. Then he fired before Nan could believe he had lined the sights. Once, twice, three times his hand fell and rose sharply on the lever, with every mark of precision, yet so rapidly Nan could not understand how he could discover what his shots were doing.
The fire came steadily back, and deliberately, without the least intimation of being affected by de Spain’s return. It was a duel shorn of every element of equality, with an assassin at one end of the range, and a man flattened half-way up the clouds against El Capitan at the other, each determined to kill the other before he should stir one more foot.
Far above, an eagle, in morning flight, soared majestically out from a jutting crag and circled again and again in front of El Capitan, while the air sang with the whining dice that two gamblers against death threw across the gulf between them. Nan, half hidden in her trough of rock, watched the great bird poise and wheel above the deadly firing, and tried to close her eyes to the figure of de Spain above her, fighting for her life and his own.
She had never before seen a man shooting to kill another. The very horror of watching de Spain, at bay among the rocks, fascinated her. Since the first day they had met she had hardly seen a rifle in his hands.
Realizing how slightly she had given thought to him or to his skill at that time, she saw now, spellbound, how a challenge to death, benumbing her with fear, had transformed him into a silent, pitiless foeman, fighting with a lightning-like decision that charged every motion with a fatality for his treacherous enemy. Her rifle, at his shoulder, no longer a mere mechanism, seemed in his hands something weightless, sensible, alive, a deadly part of his arm and eye and brain. There was no question, no thought of adjusting or handling or haste in his fire, but only an incredible swiftness and sureness that sent across the thin-aired chasm a stream of deadly messengers to seek a human life. She could only hope and pray, without even forming the words, that none of her blood were behind the other rifle, for she felt that, whoever was, could never escape.
She tried not to look. The butt of the heating rifle lay close against the red-marked cheek she knew so well, and to the tips of the fingers every particle of the man’s being was alive with strength and resource. Some strange fascination drew her senses out toward him as he knelt and threw shot after shot at the distant figure hidden on the ridge. She wanted to climb closer, to throw herself between him and the bullets meant for him. She held out her arms and clasped her hands toward him in an act of devotion. Then while she looked, breathlessly, he took his eyes an instant from the sights. “He’s running!” exclaimed de Spain as the rifle butt went instantly back to his cheek. “Whoever he is, God help him now!”
The words were more fearful to Nan than an imprecation. He had driven his enemy from the scant cover of a rut in the trail, and the man was fleeing for new cover and for life. The speck of black in the field of intense vision was moving rapidly toward the ranch-house. Bullet after bullet pitilessly led the escaping wretch. Death dogged every eager footfall. Suddenly de Spain jerked the rifle from his cheek, threw back his head, and swept his left hand across his straining eyes. Once more the rifle came up to place and, waiting for a heartbeat, to press the trigger, he paused an instant. Flame shot again in the gray morning light from the hot muzzle. The rifle fell away from the shoulder. The black speck running toward the ranch-house stumbled, as if stricken by an axe, and sprawled headlong on the trail. Throwing the lever again like lightning, de Spain held the rifle back to his cheek.
He did not fire. Second after second he waited, Nan, lying very still, watching, mute, the dull-red mark above the wet rifle butt. No one had need to tell her what had happened. Too well she read the story in de Spain’s face and in what she saw, as he knelt, perfectly still, only waiting to be sure there was no ruse. She watched the rifle come slowly down, unfired, and saw his drawn face slowly relax. Without taking his eyes off the sprawling speck, he rose stiffly to his feet. As if in a dream she saw his hand stretched toward her and heard, as he looked across the far gulf, one word: “Come!”
They reached the end of the trail. De Spain, rifle in hand, looked back. The sun, bursting in splendor across the great desert, splashed the valley and the low-lying ridge with ribboned gold. Farther up the Gap, horsemen, stirred by the firing, were riding rapidly down toward Sassoon’s ranch-house. But the black thing in the sunshine lay quite still.
CHAPTER XXVIII
LEFEVER TO THE RESCUE
Lefever, chafing in the aspen grove under the restraint of waiting in the storm, was ready long before daylight to break orders and ride in to find de Spain.
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. If, by any chance, de Spain makes his way out while the rest of us are hunting for him, you’ll be here to signal us–three shots, Bob–or to ride in with de Spain to help carry the rest of us out. Now, it’s like this,” he added, addressing the others. “You, all of you know, or ought to know–everybody ’twixt here and the railroad knows–that de Spain and Nan Morgan have fastened up to each other for the long ride down the dusty trail together. That, I take it, is their business. But her uncle, old Duke, and Gale, and the whole bunch, I hear, turned dead sore on it, and have fixed it up to beat them. You all know the Morgans. They’re some bunch–and they stick for one another like hornets, and all hold together in a fight. So I don’t want any man to ride in there with me thinking he’s going to a wedding. He isn’t. He may or may not be going to a funeral, but he’s not going to a shivaree.”
Frank Elpaso glanced sourly at his companions. “I guess everybody here is wise, John.”
“I know you are, Frank,” retorted Lefever testily; “that’s all right. I’m only explaining. And I don’t want you to get sore on me if I don’t show you a fight.” Frank Elpaso grunted. “I am under orders.” John waved his hand. “And I can’t do anything–”
“But talk,” growled Frank Elpaso, not waving his hand.
Lefever started hotly forward in his saddle. “Now look here, Frank.” He pointed his finger at the objecting ranger. “I’m here for business, not for pleasure. Any time I’m free you can talk to me–”
“Not till somebody gags you, John,” interposed Elpaso moodily.
“Look here, Elpaso,” demanded Lefever, spurring his horse smartly toward the Texan, “are you looking for a fight with me right here and now?”
“Yes, here and now,” declared Elpaso fiercely.
“Or, there and then,” interposed Kennedy, ironically, “some time, somewhere, or no time, nowhere. Having heard all of which, a hundred and fifty times from you two fellows, let us have peace. You’ve pulled it so often, over at Sleepy Cat, they’ve got it in double-faced, red-seal records. Let’s get started.”
“Right you are, Farrell,” assented Lefever, “but–”
“Second verse, John. You’re boss here; what are we going to do? That’s all we want to know.”
“Henry’s orders were to wait here till ten o’clock this morning. There’s been firing inside twice since twelve o’clock last night. He told me to pay no attention to that. But if the whole place hadn’t been under water all night, I’d have gone in, anyway. This last time it was two high-powered guns, picking at long range and, if I’m any judge of rifles and the men probably behind them, some one must have got hurt. It’s all a guess–but I’m going in there, peaceably if I can, to look for Henry de Spain; if we are fired on–we’ve got to fight for it. And if there’s any talking to be done–”
“You can do it,” grunted Elpaso.
“Thank you, Frank. And I will do it. I need not say that Kennedy will ride ahead with me, Elpaso and Wickwire with Tommie Meggeson.”
Leaving Scott in the trees, the little party trotted smartly up the road, picking their way through the pools and across the brawling streams that tore over the trail toward Duke Morgan’s place. The condition of the trail broke their formation continually and Lefever, in the circumstances, was not sorry. His only anxiety was to keep Elpaso from riding ahead far enough to embroil them in a quarrel before he himself should come up.
Half-way to Duke’s house they found a small bridge had gone out. It cut off the direct road, and, at Elpaso’s suggestion, they crossed over to follow the ridge up the valley. Swimming their horses through the backwater that covered the depression to the south, they gained the elevation and proceeded, unmolested, on their way. As they approached Sassoon’s place, Elpaso, riding ahead, drew up his horse and sat a moment studying the trail and casting an occasional glance in the direction of the ranch-house, which lay under the brow of a hill ahead.
When Lefever rode up to him, he saw the story that Elpaso was reading in the roadway. It told of a man shot in his tracks as he was running toward the house–and, in the judgment of these men, fatally shot–for, while his companions spread like a fan in front of him, Lefever got off his horse and, bending intently over the sudden page torn out of a man’s life, recast the scene that had taken place, where he stood, half an hour earlier. Some little time Lefever spent patiently deciphering the story printed in the rutted road, and marked by a wide crimson splash in the middle of it. He rose from his study at length and followed back the trail of the running feet that had been stricken at the pool. He stopped in front of a fragment of rock jutting up beside the road, studied it a while and, looking about, picked up a number of empty cartridge-shells, examined them, and tossed them away. Then he straightened up and looked searchingly across the Gap. Only the great, silent face of El Capitan confronted him. It told no tales.
“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. But it was to a finish–and blamed if at first it didn’t scare me. I thought it might be Henry. Hang it, get down and see for yourselves, boys.”
Elpaso answered his invitation with an inquiry. “Who was this fellow fighting with?”
“That, also, is a question. Certainly not with Henry de Spain, because the other fellow, I think, was using soft-nosed bullets. No white man does that, much less de Spain.”
“Unless he used another rifle,” suggested Kennedy.
“Tell me how they could get his own rifle away from him if he could fire a gun at all. I don’t put Henry quite as high with a rifle as with a revolver–if you want to split hairs–mind, I say, if you want to split hairs. But no man that’s ever seen him handle either would want to try to take any kind of a gun from him. Whoever it was,” Lefever got up into his saddle again, “threw some ounces of lead into that piece of rock back there, though I don’t understand how any one could see a man lying behind it.
“Anyway, whoever was hit here has been carried down the road. We’ll try Sassoon’s ranch-house for news, if they don’t open on us with rifles before we get there.”
In the sunshine a man in shirt sleeves, and leaning against the jamb, stood in the open doorway of Sassoon’s shack, watching the invaders as they rode around the hill and gingerly approached. Lefever recognized Satt Morgan. He flung a greeting to him from the saddle.
Satt answered in kind, but he eyed the horsemen with reserve when they drew up, and he seemed to Lefever altogether less responsive than usual. John sparred with him for information, and Satterlee gave back words without any.
“Can’t tell us anything about de Spain, eh?” echoed Lefever at length. “All right, Satt, we’ll find somebody that can. Is there a bridge over to Duke’s on this trail?”
Satt’s nose wrinkled into his normal smile. “There is a bridge–” The report of three shots fired in the distance, seemingly from the mouth of the Gap, interrupted him. He paused in his utterance. There were no further shots, and he resumed: “There is a bridge that way, yes, but it was washed out last night. They’re blockaded. Duke and Gale are over there. They’re pretty sore on your man de Spain. You’d better keep away from ’em this morning unless you’re looking for trouble.”
Lefever, having all needed information from Scott’s signal, raised his hand quickly. “Not at all,” he exclaimed, leaning forward to emphasize his words and adding the full orbit of his eye to his sincerity of manner. “Not at all, Satt. This is all friendly, all friendly. But,” he coughed slightly, as if in apology, “if Henry shouldn’t turn up all right, we’ll–ahem–be back.”
None of his companions needed to be told how to get prudently away. At a nod from Lefever Tommie Meggeson, Elpaso, and Wickwire wheeled their horses, rode rapidly back to the turn near the hill and, facing about, halted, with their rifles across their arms. Lefever and Kennedy followed leisurely, and the party withdrew leaving Satterlee, unmoved, in the sunny doorway. Once out of sight, Lefever led the way rapidly down the Gap to the rendezvous.
Of all the confused impressions that crowded Nan’s memory after the wild night on Music Mountain, the most vivid was that of a noticeably light-stepping and not ungraceful fat man advancing, hat in hand, to greet her as she stood with de Spain, weary and bedraggled in the aspen grove.
A smile flamed from her eyes when, turning at once, he rebuked de Spain with dignity for not introducing him to Nan, and while de Spain made apologies Lefever introduced himself.
“And is this,” murmured Nan, looking at him quizzically, “really Mr. John Lefever whom I’ve heard so many stories about?”
She was conscious of his pleasing eyes and even teeth as he smiled again. “If they have come from Mr. de Spain–I warn you,” said John, “take them with all reserve.”
“But they haven’t all come from Mr. de Spain.”
“If they come from any of my friends, discredit them in advance. You could believe what my enemies say,” he ran on; then added ingenuously, “if I had any enemies!” To de Spain he talked very little. It seemed to take but few words to exchange the news. Lefever asked gingerly about the fight. He made no mention whatever of the crimson pool in the road near Sassoon’s hut.