De Spain himself, somewhat surprised at the storm he had kicked up, heeded the counsel of Scott, and while the acute stage of the resentment raged along the trail he ran down for a few days to Medicine Bend to buy horses. Both Gale and Duke Morgan proclaimed, in certain public places in Sleepy Cat, their intention of shooting de Spain on sight; and as a climax to all the excitement of the week following his capture, the slippery Sassoon broke jail and, after a brief interval, appeared at large in Calabasas. This feat of the Morgan satellite made a loud laugh at de Spain's expense. It mitigated somewhat the humiliation of Sassoon's friends, but it in no wise diminished their expressed resolve to punish de Spain's invasion. Lefever, who as the mixer among the stage men, kept close to the drift of public sentiment, decided after de Spain's return to Sleepy Cat that the stage-line authorities had gained nothing by Sassoon's capture. "We ought to have thought of it before, Henry," he said frankly one night in Jeffries's office, "but we didn't think." "Meaning just what, John?" demanded de Spain without real interest. "Meaning, that in this country you can't begin on a play like pulling Sassoon out from under his friends' noses without keeping up the pace--without a second and third act. You dragged Sassoon by his hair out of the Gap; good. You surprised everybody; good. But you can't very well stop at that, Henry. You have raised hopes, you have led people to invest you with the faint glimmerings of a reputation. I say, the glimmerings, because such a feat by itself doesn't insure a permanent reputation, Henry. It is, so to say, merely a 'demand' reputation--one that men reserve the right to recall at any moment. And the worst of it is, if they ever do recall it, you are worse off than when before they extended the brittle bauble to you." "Jingo, John! For a stage blacksmith you are some spieler." De Spain added an impatient, not to say contumelious exclamation concerning the substance of Lefever's talk. "I didn't ask them for a reputation. This man interfered with my guard--in fact, tried to cut his throat, didn't he?" "Would have done it if Frank had been an honest man." "That is all there is to it, isn't it? If Sassoon or anybody else gets in the way of the stages, I'll go after them again--that's all there is to it, isn't it?" Lefever tapped the second finger of one fat hand gently on the table. "Practically; practically all, Henry, yes. You don't quite understand, but you have the right idea. What I am trying to hammer into your dense cocoanut is, that when a man has, gets, or is given a reputation out in this country, he has got to live up to it." "What do you want me to do--back a horse and shoot two guns at once up and down Main Street, cowboy style?" Lefever kept his patience without difficulty. "No, no. You'll understand." "Scott advised me to run down to Medicine Bend for a few days to let the Morgans cool off."