gloom fell on the community.

In a lifetime of years there can come to the greater part of us but a
few days, a few hours, sometimes no more than a single moment, to
show of what stuff we are really made. Such a crisis came that day to
Nan. Already she had been wheeled more than once into de Spain's room,
to sit where she could help to woo him back to life. The chief
surgeon, in the morning, told Nan of the decision. In her hospital bed
she rose bolt upright. "No!" she declared solemnly. "You shan't take
his arm off!"

The surgeon met her rebellion tactfully. But he told Nan, at last,
that de Spain must lose either his arm or his life. "No," she repeated
without hesitation and without blanching, "you shan't take off his
arm. He shan't lose his life."

The blood surged into her cheeks--better blood and redder than the
doctors had been able to bring there--such blood as de Spain alone
could call into them. Nan, with her nurse's help, dressed, joined de
Spain, and talked long and earnestly. The doctors, too, laid the
situation before him. When they asked him for his decision, he nodded
toward Nan. "She will tell you, gentlemen, what we'll do."

And Nan did tell them what the two who had most at stake in the
decision would do. Any man could have done as much as that. But Nan
did more. She set herself out to save the arm and patient both, and,
lest the doctors should change their tactics and move together on the
arm surreptitiously, Nan stayed night and day with de Spain, until he
was able to make such active use of either arm as to convince her that
he, and not the surgeons, would soon need the most watching.

Afterward when Nan, in some doubt, asked the chaplain whether she was
married or single, he obligingly offered to ratify and confirm the
desert ceremony.

This affair was the occasion for an extraordinary round-up at Sleepy
Cat. Two long-hostile elements--the stage and railroad men and the
Calabasas-Morgan Gap contingent of mountain-men, for once at least,
fraternized. Warrants were pigeonholed, suspicion suspended, side-arms
neglected in their scabbards. The fighting men of both camps, in the
presence of a ceremony that united de Spain and Nan Morgan, could not
but feel a generous elation. Each party considered that it was
contributing to the festivity in the bride and the groom the very best
each could boast, and no false note disturbed the harmony of the
notable day.

Gale Morgan, having given up the fight