knew an old Scotch Medicine Bend
barnman that worked there, a boyhood friend; but the man, McAlpin, was
out. After looking the horses over and inspecting the wagons with a
new but mild curiosity, awakened by Jeffries's proposal, de Spain
walked back toward the station. He had virtually decided not to take
the job that Jeffries painted as so attractive, and resolved now to
take the night train back to Medicine Bend. Medicine Bend was his
home. He knew every man, woman, and child in the town. Before the
tragic death of his father, his mother had lived there, and de Spain
had grown up in the town and gone to school there. He was a railroad
man, anyway--a modest trainmaster--and not eager for stage-line
management.

The prospect of reducing the Sinks to a law-and-order basis at his own
proper risk could not be alluring to the most aggressive of
law-and-order men--and de Spain was not aggressive. Yet within a
moment of his sensible decision he was to be hurried by a mere
accident to an exactly contrary fate.

As he passed Grant Street again he encountered a party on horseback
heading for the river bridge. Trotting their horses leisurely, they
turned the corner directly in front of de Spain. There were five in
the company. Three of the men were riding abreast and a little ahead.
Of these, the middle horseman was a spare man of forty years, with a
black military hat, and a frankly disreputable air. His face was drawn
up into a one-sided smile, marked by a deep, vertical wrinkle running
up, close to his nose, from the corner of his mouth almost to the
inner corner of his eye. Satt Morgan's smile was habitual and lessened
his stern aspect. At his right rode his cousin, Duke Morgan, older,
shorter, and stouter. His square, heavy-jawed, smooth-shaven face was
lighted by hard, keen eyes, and finished by an uncompromising chin.
Duke was the real head of the clan, of which there were numerous
branches in the Superstition Mountains, all looking with friendliness
or enmity to the Morgans of Morgan's Gap.

The yellow-haired man riding on the left, with a red face and
red-lidded, squinting eyes, was in stature something between the two
Morgans, and about the age of the elder cousin. His shoulders
slouched, and he showed none of the blood of his companions. But this
man, David Sassoon, the Calabasas gambler, quondam cowboy, and chronic
brawler, stood in some way close to the different Morgans, and was
reputed to have got each of them