The Ozark spectator., 1917-05-09
CHAPTER XVI.
Her Bad Penny.

Nan reached her room in fever of excitement, angry at De Spain, bitterly angry at Gale. angry with the moun- tains, the world, and resentfully fight ing the pillow on which she cried her self 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 break fast he was surprised by an answer equally short. Her uncle retorted sharply. A second curt answer greet ed his rebuff, and while he stared at her. Nan left the table and the room.
 Duke, taking two of the men, start ed that morning for Sleepy Cat with bunch of cattle. He rode fractious horse, infuriated, as his horses ire Quently were, by his brutal treatment, bolted in 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 Seri- ous one. He picked himself up while the men were recovering his horse, knocked the horse over the head with piece of jagged rock when the fright ened 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 horse, nor sit in a wagon. Sleepy Cat was stirred at the news, and that the man who had detied everybody in the mountains for twenty years should have been laid low and sent to the hospital by q mere broncho was the topic of many comments. De Spain, who was at Calabasas, knew Nan would not be alarmed should her uncle not return that night. But early in the | morning n messenger from McAlpin rode to her with note telling her of the accident.
 Whatever his vices, Duke had been n good protector to his dead brothers child. He had sent her to good schools and tried to revive in her, despite her untoward surroundings, the better tra- ditions of the family as 1t had once fiourished in Kentucky. Nan took the saddle for Sleepy Cat in haste and alarm. When she reached her uncle's bedside she understood how seriously he had been hurt, and the doctors warnings were not needed to convince her he must have care.
 Duke refused to let her leave him, in any case, and Nan relieved the nurse, and, what was of equal moment, made herself custodian of the cash In hand before Dukes town compan- ions could get hold of 1t. Occasional trips to the gap were necessary as the weeks passed and her uncle could not be moved. These Nan had feared as threatening m encounter either by ac- cident, or on his part designed. with De Spain. But the impending encoun- ter never took place. De Spain, at tending closely to his own business, managed to keep accurate track of her whereabouts without getting In her way. She had come to Sleepy Cat dreading to meet him and fearing his influence over her. but this apprehen- sion, with the passing of curiously brief period. dissolved into conf- dence in her ability to withstand fur ther interference, on anyones part, with her feelings.
 Gale Morgan rode into town ire quently, and Nan at first painfully ap- prehended hearing sometime of dead ly duel between her truculent gap ad- mirer and her persistent town courier who was more considerate and bet ter hammered. but no less logged, and, in fact, good deal more difficult to handle.
 As to the bolsterous mountain man. his resolute little cousin made no se- cret of her detestation of him. She denied and defied him as openly as a girl could. and heard his threats with continued indifference. She was quite alone, too, in her fear of any fatal meeting between the two men who seemed determined to pursue her.
 The truth was that after Calabasas, De Spain. from Thief river to Sleepy Cat, was marked man. None sought | to cross his path or his purposes, and neither the town haunts of Calabasas | men nor those of their Morgan Gap 1 sympathiZers had any champion dis | posed to follow too closely the alert l Medicine Bend railroader.
 In and about the hospital, and Tn the | town itself, Nan found the chief ob- stacle to her peace of mind in the talk she could not always avoid hearing about De Spain. Convalcscents in the corridors, practically all of them men. never gathered in sunny corners or at the tables in the dining room without