ll to meet the train on which de Spain
had told her he would return from the east. She rode straight to the
hospital, instead of going to the livery-barn, and leaving her horse,
got supper and walked by way of unfrequented streets down-town to the
station to wait for the train.

Never had she felt so miserable, so helpless, so forsaken, so alone.
With the thought of her nearest relative, the man who had been a
father to her and provided a home for her as long as she could
remember, seeking to kill him whose devotion had given her all the
happiness she had ever known, and whose safety meant her only pledge
of happiness for the future--her heart sank.

When the big train drew slowly, almost noiselessly, in, Nan took her
place where no incoming passenger could escape her gaze and waited for
de Spain. Scanning eagerly the figures of the men that walked up the
long platform and approached the station exit, the fear that she
should not see him battled with the hope that he would still appear.
But when all the arrivals had been accounted for, he had not come.

She turned, heavy-hearted, to walk back uptown, trying to think
of whom she might seek some information concerning de Spain's
whereabouts, when her eye fell on a man standing not ten feet away
at the door of the baggage-room. He was alone and seemed to be
watching the changing of the engines, but Nan thought she knew
him by sight. The rather long, straight, black hair under the
broad-brimmed Stetson hat marked the man known and hated in the Gap
as "the Indian." Here, she said to herself, was a chance. De Spain,
she recalled, spoke of no one oftener than this man. He seemed
wholly disengaged.

Repressing her nervous timidity, Nan walked over to him. "Aren't you
Mr. Scott?" she asked abruptly.

Scott, turning to her, touched his hat as if quite unaware until that
moment of her existence. "Did Mr. de Spain get off this train?" she
asked, as Scott acknowledged his identity.

"I didn't see him. I guess he didn't come to-night." Nan noticed the
impassive manner of his speaking and the low, even tones. "I was kind
of looking for him myself."

"Is there another train to-night he could come on?"

"I don't think he will be back now before to-morrow night."

Nan, much disappointed, looked up the line and down. "I rode in this
afternoon from Music Mountain especially to see him." Scott, without
commenting, smiled with understanding and encouragement, and Nan was
so fille