"Send him to me! This is no place for a woman that calls me what you call me--send your cousin and all his friends!" His voice shook with anger. "Tell him I'm wounded; tell him I've had nothing to eat since I fought him before. And if he's still afraid"--de Spain drew and broke his revolver almost like a flash. In that incredibly quick instant she realized he might have threatened her life before she could move a muscle--"tell your fine cousin I've got one cartridge left--just one!" So saying, he held in one hand the loaded cartridge and in the other the empty revolver. "You think little of bloodshed, I know," she returned unpleasantly. "I think a whole lot," he drawled in painful retort, "of fair fighting." "And I'm a woman--you do well to taunt me with that." "I did not taunt you with it. You are hatefully unjust," he protested sullenly. "You've asked me to go--I'm going. How much of what you tell me is true, I don't know. But I can believe my own eyes, and I believe you are not in condition to do much injury, even if you came here with that intention. You will certainly lose your life if you move from your hiding-place." She started away. He leaned toward her. "Stop," he said peremptorily, raising himself with a wrenching effort. Something in the stern eye held her. His extended hand pointed toward her as arbitrarily as if, instead of lying helpless at her feet, he could command her to his bidding. "I want to ask you a question. I've told you the truth. I have just one cartridge. If you are going to send your cousin and his men here, it's only fair I should know it now--isn't it?" Her face was hard in spite of the weakness he struggled to conceal. It annoyed her to think he had surmised she was revolving in her mind what to do. He was demanding an answer she had not yet given to herself. "My cousin is wounded," she said, pausing. And then with indecision: "If you stay here quietly you are not likely to be molested." She stepped down from the ledge as noiselessly as she had come. Shaken by the discovery she had so unexpectedly made, Nan retreated almost precipitately from the spot. And the question of what to do worried her as much as it worried de Spain. The whole range had been shaken by the Calabasas fight. Even in a country where appeal to arms was common, where men were ready to snuff out a life for a word, or kill for a mess of pottage--to settle for the least grave offense a dispute with a shot--the story of the surprising, unequal, and fatal encounter of the Calabasas men with de Spain, and of his complete disappearance after withstanding almost unheard-of odds, was more than a three days' wonder; nothing else was talked of for weeks. Even the men in Morgan's Gap, supposed to be past masters of the game played in the closed room at Calabasas, had been stunned by the issue of the few minutes with Jeffries's new man.