re for?" demanded Nan indignantly, but
not warily.

McAlpin, the situation now in hand, took his time to it. He leaned
forward in a manner calculated to invite confidence without giving
offense. "Miss Nan," said he simply, "I worked for your Uncle Duke for
five years--you know that." Nan had, at least, heard it fifty times.
"I think a good deal of him--I think a good deal of you, so does the
missus, so does little Loretta--she's always asking about you, the
child is--and I hear and see a good deal here that other people don't
get next to--they can't. Now Henry de Spain was here, with me, sitting
right there where you are sitting, Miss Nan, in that chair," declared
McAlpin with an unanswerable finger, "not fifteen minutes before that
fight began, he was there. I told you he never went down there to
fight. Do you want the proof? I'll tell you--I wouldn't want anybody
else to know--will you keep it?"

Nan seemed indifferent. "Girls are not supposed to keep secrets," she
said obstinately.

Her narrator was not to be balked. He pointed to the coat-rack on the
wall in front of them both. "There is Henry de Spain's coat. He hung
it there just before he went down to the inn. Under it, if you look,
you'll find his belt of cartridges. Don't take my word--look for
yourself."

Giving this information time to sink in, McAlpin continued. Nan's eyes
had turned, despite her indifference, to the coat; but she was
thinking more intently about the belt which McAlpin asserted hung
under it. "You want to know what he did go down to the hotel for that
afternoon? I happen to know that, too," averred McAlpin, sitting down,
but respectfully, on the edge of the chair. "First I want to say this:
I worked for your Uncle Duke five years."

He paused to give Nan a chance to dispute the statement if she so
desired. Then taking her despairing silence as an indorsement of his
position in giving her a confidence, he went on: "Henry de Spain is
dead," he said quietly. She eyed him without so much as winking. "I
wouldn't tell it if he wasn't. Some of the boys don't believe he is.
I'm not a pessimist--not a bit--but I'm telling you it's a physical
impossibility for a man to take the fire of four revolvers in the
hands of four men like those four men, at arm's length, and live.
Henry de Spain is the cleverest man with a gun that ever rode the
Spanish Sinks, but limits is limits; the boy's dead. And he was always
talking about you. It's God's truth, a