an if it were
she. In another moment his ear told him there were two horses
approaching. He waited for the couple to cross the bridge, and they
passed him so close he could almost have touched the nearer rider.
Then he realized, as the horse passing beside him shied, that it was
Sandusky and Logan riding silently by.

For a week de Spain spent most of his time in Sleepy Cat trying to
catch sight of Nan. His reflection on the untoward incidents that had
set them at variance left him rebellious. He meditated more about
putting himself right with her than about all his remaining concerns
together. A strange fire had seized him--that fire of the imagination
which scorns fair words and fine reasoning, but which, smothered,
burns in secret until, fanned by the wind of accident, it bursts out
the more fiercely because of the depths in which it has smouldered.

Every day that de Spain rode across the open country, his eyes turned
to the far range and to Music Mountain. The rounded, distant,
immutable peak--majestic as the sun, cold as the stars, shrouding in
its unknown fastnesses the mysteries of the ages and the secrets of
time--meant to him now only this mountain girl whom its solitude
sheltered and to whom his thoughts continually came back.

Within two weeks he became desperate. He rode the Gap trail from
Sleepy Cat again and again for miles and miles in the effort to
encounter her. He came to know every ridge and hollow on it, every
patch and stone between the lava beds and the Rat River. And in spite
of the counsels of his associates, who warned him to beware of traps,
he spent, under one pretext or another, much of the time either on the
stages to and from Calabasas or in the saddle toward Morgan's Gap,
looking for Nan.

Killing time in this way, after a fruitless ride, his persistence was
one day most unexpectedly rewarded at the Calabasas barns. He had
ridden through a hot sun from Sleepy Cat, passing the up stage
half-way to Calabasas, and had struck from there directly out on
the Sinks toward Morgan's Gap. Riding thence around the lower lava
beds, he had headed for Calabasas, where he had an appointment to
meet Scott and Lefever at five o'clock. When de Spain reached the
Calabasas barn, McAlpin, the barn boss, was standing in the
doorway. "You'd never be comin' from Sleepy Cat in the saddle!"
exclaimed McAlpin incredulously. De Spain nodded affirmatively as he
dismounted. "Hot ride, sir; a hot day," commented M