ound yet. I expect to find him. For ten years
I've been getting ready to find him. He is here--in these mountains. I
don't even know his name. But if I live, I'll find him. And when I do,
I'll tear open his head with a soft bullet in the way he tore my
father's open. After I get through with that man"--he hesitated--"they
may call me whatever they like."

The faint ghostliness of the coming day, writing its warning in the
eastern sky, the bitter chill of the dying night, the slow, hard,
impassive utterance, the darkness in which she stood listening to an
enemy she could not see, the loneliness and danger of her situation
combined to impress on the unwilling listener the picture of the
murder, the tragic birth, and the mother's death. "You want me out of
the Gap," de Spain concluded, his voice unchanged. "I want to get out.
Come back, once more, in the daytime. I will see what I can do with my
foot by that time." He paused. "Will you come?"

She hesitated. "It would be too dangerous for me to come up here in
the daytime. Trouble would follow."

"Come at dusk. You know I am no murderer."

"I don't know it," she persisted stubbornly. It was her final
protest.

"Count, some day, on knowing it."

CHAPTER XV

CROSSING A DEEP RIVER

A grizzly bear hidden among the haystacks back of the corral would
have given Nan much less anxiety than de Spain secreted in the heart
of the Morgan stronghold. But as she hurried home, fearful of
encountering an early rider who should ask questions, it seemed as if
she might, indeed, find some way of getting rid of the troublesome foe
without having it on her conscience that she had starved a wounded man
to death, or that he had shot some one of her people in getting away.

Her troubled speculations were reduced now almost to wondering when de
Spain would leave, and, disinclined though she felt to further parley,
she believed he would go the sooner if she were to consent to see him
again. Everything he had said to her seemed to unsettle her mind and
to imperil impressions concerning him that she felt it dangerous, or
at least treasonable, to part with. To believe anything but the worst
of a man whom she heard cursed and abused continually by her uncles,
cousins, and their associates and retainers, seemed a monstrous
thing--and every effort de Spain made to dislodge her prejudices
called for fresh distrust on her part. What had most shaken her
convictions--and it would come bac