Nan of Music MountainSpearman, Frank H. (Frank Hamilton)
General
Nan of Music Mountain
Spearman, Frank H. (Frank Hamilton)
Adventure stories; Western stories
As he passed Grant Street again he encountered a party on horseback
heading for the river bridge. Trotting their horses leisurely, they
turned the corner directly in front of de Spain. There were five in
the company. Three of the men were riding abreast and a little ahead.
Of these, the middle horseman was a spare man of forty years, with a
black military hat, and a frankly disreputable air. His face was drawn
up into a one-sided smile, marked by a deep, vertical wrinkle running
up, close to his nose, from the corner of his mouth almost to the
inner corner of his eye. Satt Morgan's smile was habitual and lessened
his stern aspect. At his right rode his cousin, Duke Morgan, older,
shorter, and stouter. His square, heavy-jawed, smooth-shaven face was
lighted by hard, keen eyes, and finished by an uncompromising chin.
Duke was the real head of the clan, of which there were numerous
branches in the Superstition Mountains, all looking with friendliness
or enmity to the Morgans of Morgan's Gap.
The yellow-haired man riding on the left, with a red face and
red-lidded, squinting eyes, was in stature something between the two
Morgans, and about the age of the elder cousin. His shoulders
slouched, and he showed none of the blood of his companions. But this
man, David Sassoon, the Calabasas gambler, quondam cowboy, and chronic
brawler, stood in some way close to the different Morgans, and was
reputed to have got each of them, at different times, out of more than
one troublesome affair, either by sheer force of arms, or through his
resourceful cunning.
These men were followed by a younger man riding with a very young
woman. De Spain knew none of the front-rank men, but he knew well Nan
Morgan and her dancing partner.
They were talking together, and Nan seemed from her manner at odds
with her companion. He appeared to be trying to laugh the situation
off when he caught sight of de Spain pausing for them to pass. Gale's
face lighted as he set eyes on him, and he spoke quickly to Nan. De
Spain could not at first hear his words, but he needed no ears to
interpret his laugh and the expression on his face. Nan, persistently
importuned, looked around. She saw de Spain, much closer, it would
seem, than she had expected to see a man looking directly at her, and
her eyes rested on him only a moment. The substance of her cousin's
words she apparently had not caught, and he repeated them in a louder
voice: "There's your handsome Medicine Bend gunman!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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