Long before you get this I shall be speeding toward the Gap. I am going to Uncle Duke to get from him the exact truth. Uncle Duke is breaking--has broken--and now that the very worst has come, and we must face it, he will tell me what I ask. Whether I can get him to repeat this to you, to come to you, to throw himself on your pity, my dearest one, I don't know. But it is for this I am going to try, and for this I beg of your love--the love of which I have been so proud!--that you will let me stay with him until I at least learn everything and can bring the whole story to you. If I can bring him, I will. And I shall be safe with him--perfectly safe. Gale has been driven away. Pardaloe, I know I can trust, and he will be under the roof with me. _Please, do not try to come to me._ It might ruin everything. Only forgive me, and I shall be back with what I hope for, or what I fear, very, very soon. Not till then can I bear to look into your eyes. You have a better right than anyone in the world to know the whole truth, cost what it may. Be patient for only a little while with NAN. It was Jeffries who said, afterward, he hoped never again to be the bearer of a letter such as that. Never until he had read and grasped the contents of Nan's note had Jeffries seen the bundle of resource and nerve and sinew, that men called Henry de Spain, go to pieces. For once, trouble overbore him. When he was able to speak he told Jeffries everything. "It is my fault," he said hopelessly. "I was so crippled, so stunned, she must have thought--I see it now--that I was making ready to ride out by daybreak and shoot Duke down on sight. It's the price a man must pay, Jeffries, for the ability to defend himself against this bunch of hold-up men and assassins. Because they can't get me, I'm a 'gunman'----" "No, you're not a 'gunman.'" "A gunman and nothing else. That's what everybody, friends and enemies, reckon me--a gunman. You put me here to clean out this Calabasas gang, not because of my good looks, but because I've been, so far, a fraction of a second quicker on a trigger than these double-damned crooks. "I don't get any fun out of standing for ten minutes at a time with a sixty-pound safety-valve dragging on my heart, watching a man's eye to see whether he is going to pull a gun on me and knock me down with a slug before I can pull one and knock him down. I don't care for that kind of thing, Jeff. Hell's delight! I'd rather have a little ranch with a little patch of alfalfa--enough alfalfa to feed a little bunch of cattle, a hundred miles from every living soul. What I would like to do is to own a piece of land under a ten-cent ditch, and watch the wheat sprout out of the desert." Jeffries, from behind his pipe, regarded de Spain's random talk calmly.