faces.
He half rose up, struggling in a frenzy with the hands that restrained
him. While his companions pleaded to quiet him, he fought them until,
restored to its seat of reason, his mind reasserted itself and, lying
exhausted, he told them in his exquisite torture of whom he had left,
and what must be done to find and bring them in.

While the relief wagons, equipped with straining teams and flanked by
veteran horsemen, were dashing out of the barn, he lapsed into
unconsciousness. But he had been able to hold Scott's hand long enough
to tell him he must find Nan and bring her in, or never come back.

It was Scott who found her. In their gropings through the blizzard the
three had wandered nearer Calabasas than any one of them dreamed. And
on the open desert, far south and east of the upper lava beds, it was
Scott's horse that put a foot through the bottom of the overturned
wagon box. The suspected mound of snow, with the buried horses
scrambling to their feet, rose upright at the crash. Duke crouched,
half-conscious, under the rude shelter. Lying where he had placed her,
snugly between the horses, Scott found Nan. He spoke to her when she
opened her staring eyes, picked her up in his arms, called to his
companions for the covered wagon, and began to restore her, without a
moment of delay, to life. He even promised if she would drink the
hateful draft he put to her lips and let him cut away her shoes and
leggings and the big coat frozen on her, that in less than an hour she
should see Henry de Spain alive and well.

CHAPTER XXXIV

AT SLEEPY CAT

Nothing in nature, not even the storm itself, is so cruel as the
beauty of the after calm. In the radiance of the sunshine next day de
Spain, delirious and muttering, was taken to the hospital at Sleepy
Cat. In an adjoining room lay Nan, moaning reproaches at those who
were torturing her reluctantly back to life. Day and night the doctors
worked over the three. The town, the division, the stagemen, and the
mountain-men watched the outcome of the struggle. From as far as
Medicine Bend railroad surgeons came to aid in the fight.

De Spain cost the most acute anxiety. The crux of the battle, after
the three lives were held safe, centred on the effort to save de
Spain's arm--the one he had chosen to lose, if he must lose one, when
he strapped it to the whiffletree. The day the surgeons agreed that if
his life were to be saved the arm must come off at the shoulder a