--they'll jump at the chance."

"You are a cold-blooded, brutal wretch--I'm sorry I ever helped
you--I'm sorry I ever let you help me--I'm sorry I ever saw you!"

She sprang away before he could interpose a word. He stood stunned by
the suddenness of her outburst, trying to listen and to breathe at the
same time. He heard the front door close, and stood waiting. But no
further sound from the house greeted his ears.

"And I thought," he muttered to himself, "that might calm her down a
little. I'm certainly in wrong, now."

CHAPTER XVIII

HER BAD PENNY

Nan reached her room in a fever of excitement, angry at de Spain,
bitterly angry at Gale, angry with the mountains, the world, and
resentfully fighting the pillow on which she cried herself to sleep.

In the morning every nerve was on edge. When her Uncle Duke, with his
chopping utterance, said something short to her at their very early
breakfast he was surprised by an answer equally short. Her uncle
retorted sharply. A second curt answer greeted his rebuff, and while
he stared at her, Nan left the table and the room.

Duke, taking two of the men, started that morning for Sleepy Cat with
a bunch of cattle. He rode a fractious horse, as he always did, and
this time the horse, infuriated as his horses frequently were by his
brutal treatment, bolted in a moment unguarded by his master, and
flung Duke on his back in a strip of lava rocks.

The old man--in the mountains a man is called old after he passes
forty--was heavy, and the fall a serious one. He picked himself up
while the men were recovering his horse, knocked the horse over with
a piece of jagged rock when the frightened beast was brought back,
climbed into the saddle again, and rode all the way into town.

But when his business was done, Duke, too, was done. He could neither
sit a horse, nor sit in a wagon. Doctor Torpy, after an examination,
told him he was booked for the hospital. A stream of profane protest
made no difference with his adviser, and, after many threats and hard
words, to the hospital the hard-shelled mountaineer was taken. Sleepy
Cat was stirred at the news, and that the man who had defied everybody
in the mountains for twenty years should have been laid low and sent
to the hospital by a mere bronco was the topic of many comments.

The men that had driven the cattle with Duke, having been paid off,
were now past getting home, and there were no telephones in the Gap.
De Spain, wh