It was a tedious ride, and de Spain was much too engaged with his thoughts to sleep. The Morgans were in his head, and he could not be rid of them. He recalled having been told that long ago some of these same Morgans lived on the Peace River above his father's ranch. Every story he had ever heard of their wild lives, for they were men sudden in quarrel and reckless of sequel, came back to his mind. He wondered what sort of a young girl this could be who lived among them--who _could_ live among them--and be what she seemed at a glance to be--a fawn among mountain-wolves. It was late when he reached Medicine Bend, and raining--a dismal kind of a night. Instead of going to his room, just across the street from the station, he went up-stairs and sat down with the train-despatchers. After an hour of indecision, marked by alternative fits of making up and unmaking his mind, he went, instead of going to bed, into the telegraph-room, where black-haired Dick Grady sat at a key. "How about the fight to-night at Sleepy Cat?" Grady asked at once. "What fight?" demanded de Spain perfunctorily. "The Calabasas gang got to going again up there to-night. They say one of the Morgans was in it. Some town, that Sleepy Cat, eh, Henry?" "What Morgan was in it?" "Gale Morgan. A lot of stuff came in on it an hour ago. Was there anything started when you left?" "I didn't hear of anything," responded de Spain. But his indifference to the subject was marked. "What's the matter?" demanded the operator. "Aren't you well to-night?" "Perfectly." "Sleepy?" De Spain roused himself. "Dick, have you got a Sleepy Cat wire open?" "What do you want?" "Tell Jeffries I'll take that Thief River stage job." CHAPTER III THE SPANISH SINKS From a car window at Sleepy Cat may be seen, stretching far down into the southwest a chain of towering peaks, usually snow-clad, that dominate the desert in every direction for almost a hundred miles. In two extended groups, separated by a narrow but well-defined break, they constitute a magnificent rampart, named by Spaniards the Superstition Mountains, and they stretch beyond the horizon to the south, along the vast depression known locally as the Spanish Sinks. The break on the eastern side of the chain comes about twenty miles southwest of Sleepy Cat, and is marked on the north by the most striking, and in some respects most majestic peak in the range--Music Mountain; the break itself has taken the name of its earliest white settlers, and is called Morgan's Gap. No railroad has ever yet penetrated this southern country, despite the fact that rich mines have been opened along these mountains, and are still being opened; but it lies to-day in much of the condition of primitive savagery, and lawlessness, as the word is conventionally accepted, that obtained when the first rush was made for the Thief River gold-fields.