"Yes, you will listen," he said quietly; "you shall hear every word. My father brought sheep into the Peace River country. The cattlemen picked on him to make an example of. He went out, unarmed, one night to take care of the horses. My mother heard two shots. He didn't come back. She went to look for him. He was lying under the corral gate with a hole smashed through his jaw by a rifle-bullet that tore his head half off." De Spain did not raise his voice nor did he hasten his words. "I was born one night six months after that," he continued. "My mother died that night. When a neighbor's wife took me from her arm and wrapped me in a blanket, she saw I carried the face of my father as my mother had seen it the night he was murdered. That," he said, "is what made me a 'gunman.' Not whiskey--not women--not cards--just what you've heard. And I'll tell you something else you may tell the men that call me a gunman. The man that shot down my father at his corral gate I haven't found yet. I expect to find him. For ten years I've been getting ready to find him. He is here--in these mountains. I don't even know his name. But if I live, I'll find him. And when I do, I'll tear open his head with a soft bullet in the way he tore my father's open. After I get through with that man"--he hesitated--"they may call me whatever they like." The faint ghostliness of the coming day, writing its warning in the eastern sky, the bitter chill of the dying night, the slow, hard, impassive utterance, the darkness in which she stood listening to an enemy she could not see, the loneliness and danger of her situation combined to impress on the unwilling listener the picture of the murder, the tragic birth, and the mother's death. "You want me out of the Gap," de Spain concluded, his voice unchanged. "I want to get out. Come back, once more, in the daytime. I will see what I can do with my foot by that time." He paused. "Will you come?" She hesitated. "It would be too dangerous for me to come up here in the daytime. Trouble would follow." "Come at dusk. You know I am no murderer." "I don't know it," she persisted stubbornly. It was her final protest. "Count, some day, on knowing it." CHAPTER XV CROSSING A DEEP RIVER A grizzly bear hidden among the haystacks back of the corral would have given Nan much less anxiety than de Spain secreted in the heart of the Morgan stronghold. But as she hurried home, fearful of encountering an early rider who should ask questions, it seemed as if she might, indeed, find some way of getting rid of the troublesome foe without having it on her conscience that she had starved a wounded man to death, or that he had shot some one of her people in getting away.