“No, I never knew any Captain Leek,” said Miss Slocum, “and the ones I knew hadn’t any one in the Union Army. Their principles, if they had any, were against it, and there wasn’t a Republican in the family.”
“Then, of course, that would settle Captain Leek belonging to them,” decided Mrs. Huzzard, promptly. “I don’t know much about politics, but as all our men folks wore the blue clothes, and fought in them, I was always glad I come from a Republican State. And I guess all the Republicans that carried guns against the Union could be counted without much arithmetic.”
“I—I think I will go and look for Dan myself,” observed the captain, rising and looking around a little uncertainly at Miss Slocum. “I brought some letters he may want.”
He made his bow and placed the picturesque corded hat on his head as he went out. But Mrs. Huzzard looked after him somewhat anxiously.
“He’s sick,” she decided as he vanished from her view; “I never did see him walk so draggy like. And don’t you judge his manners, either, Lavina, from this first sight of him, for he ain’t himself to-day.”
“He didn’t look to me as though he knew who he was,” remarked Lavina; and after a little she looked up from the tidy she was knitting. “So, Lorena Jane, that is the man you’ve been trying to educate yourself up to more than for anybody else—now, tell the truth!”
“Well, I don’t mind saying that it was his good manners made me see how bad mine were,” she confessed; “but as for training for him—”
“I see,” said Miss Lavina, grimly, “and it is all right; but I just thought I’d ask.”
Then she relapsed into deep thought, and made the needles click with impatience all that afternoon.
The captain came near the tent once, but retreated at the vision of the knitter. He talked with Mrs. Huzzard in the cabin of Harris, but did not visit her again in her own tent; and the poor woman began to wonder if the air of the Kootenai woods had an erratic influence on people. Dan was changed, ’Tana was changed, and now the captain seemed unlike himself from the very moment of his arrival. Even Lavina was a bit curt and indifferent, and Lorena Jane wondered where it would end.
In the midst of her perplexity, ’Tana added to it by appearing before her in the Indian dress Overton had presented her with. Since her sickness it had hung unused in her cabin, and the two women had fashioned garments more suitable, they thought, to a young girl who could wear real laces now if she chose. But there she was again, dressed like any little squaw, and although rather pale to suit the outfit, she said she wanted a few more “Indian hours” before departing for the far-off Eastern city that was to her as a new world.
She received Captain Leek with an unconcern that was discouraging to the pretty speeches he had prepared to utter.
Dan returned and looked sharply at her as she sat whittling a stick of which she said she meant to make a cane—a staff for mountain climbing.
“Where do you intend climbing?” he asked.
She waved the stick toward the hill back of them, the first step of the mountain.
“It is only a few hours since I picked you up down there, looking as if you were dead,” he said, impatiently; “and you know you are not fit to tramp.”
“Well, I’m not dead yet, anyway,” she answered, with a shrug of her shoulders; “and as I’m going to break away from this camp about to-morrow, I thought I’d like to see a bit of the woods first.”
“You—are going—to-morrow?”
“I reckon so.”
“’Tana! And you have not said a word to me of it? That was not very friendly, little girl.”
She did not reply, but bent her head low over her work.
After observing her for a while in silence, he arose and put on his hat.
“Here is my knife,” he remarked. “You had better use it, if you are determined to haggle at that stick. Your own knife is too dull for any use. You can leave it here in the cabin when you are done with it.”
She accepted it without a word, but flushed red when he had gone, and she found the eyes of Harris regarding her sadly.
“‘Not very friendly,’” she said, going over Overton’s words—“you think that, too—don’t you? You think I’m ugly, and saucy, and awful, I know! You look scoldings at me; but if you knew all, maybe you wouldn’t—if you knew that my heart is just about breaking. I’m going out where there is no one to talk to, or I’ll be crying next.”
The two cousins and the captain were in ’Tana’s cabin. Mrs. Huzzard was determined that Miss Slocum and the captain should become acquainted, and, getting sight of the girl, who was walking alone across the level, she at once followed her, thinking that the two left behind would perhaps become more social if left entirely to themselves. And they did; that is, they talked, and the captain spoke first.
“So you—you bear a grudge—don’t you, Lavina?”
“Well, I guess if I owed you a very heavy one, I’ve got a good chance to pay it off now,” she remarked, grimly.
He twirled his hat in a dejected way, and did not speak.
“You an officer in the Union Army?” she continued, derisively. “You a pattern of what a gentleman should be; you to set up as superior to these rough-handed miners; you to act as if this Government owes you a pension! Why, how would it be with you, Alf Leek, if I’d tell this camp the truth of how you went away, engaged to me, twenty-five years ago, and never let me set eyes on you since—of how I wore black for you, thinking you were killed in the war, till I heard that you had deserted. I took off that mourning quick, I can tell you! I thought you were fighting on the wrong side; yet if you had a good reason for being there, you should have staid and fought so long as there was breath in you. And if I was to tell them here that you haven’t a particle of right to wear that blue suit that looks like a uniform, and that you were no more ’captain’ of anything than I am—well, I guess Lorena Jane wouldn’t have much to say to you, though maybe Mr. Overton would.”
He grew actually pale as he listened. His fear of some one overhearing her was as great as his own mortification.
“But you—you won’t tell—will you, Lavina?” he said pleadingly. “I haven’t done any harm! I—”
“Harm! Alf Leek, you never had enough backbone to do either harm or help to any one in this world. But don’t you suppose you did me harm when you spoiled me for ever trusting any other man?”
“I—I would have come back, but I thought you’d be married,” he said, in a feeble, hopeless way.
“Likely that is now, ain’t it?” she demanded. And, woman-like, now that she had reduced him to meekness and humiliation, she grew a shade less severe, as if pretty well satisfied. “I had other things to think of besides a husband.”
“You won’t tell—will you, Lavina? I’ll tell you how it all happened, some day. Then I’ll leave this country.”
“You’ll not,” she contradicted. “You’ll stay right here as long as I do, and I won’t tell just so long as you keep from trying to make Lorena Jane believe how great you are. But at the first word of your heroic actions, or the cultured society you were always used to—”
“You’ll never hear of them,” he said eagerly, “never. I knew you wouldn’t make trouble, Lavina, for you always were such a good, kind-hearted girl.”
He offered his hand to her, sheepishly, and she gave it a vixenish slap.
“Don’t try any of your skim-milk praise on me,” she said, tartly. “Huh! You, that Lorena thought was a pillar of cultured society! When, the Lord knows, you wouldn’t have known how to read the addresses on your own letters if I hadn’t taught you!”
He moved to the door in a crestfallen manner, and stood there a moment, moistening his lips, and apparently swallowing words that could not be uttered.
“That’s so, Lavina,” he said, at last, and went out.
“There!” she muttered aggrievedly—“that’s Alf Leek, just as he always was. Give him a chance, and he’d ride over any one; but get the upper hand
of him, and he is meeker than Moses. Not that much meekness is needed to come up to Moses, either.” Then, after an impatient tattoo, she exclaimed:
“Gracious me! I do wish he hadn’t looked so crushed, and had talked back a little.”
* * *
CHAPTER XXII.
THE MURDER.
That evening, as the dusk fell, a slight figure in an Indian dress slipped to the low brush back of the cabin, and thence to the uplands.
It was ’Tana, ready to endure all the wilds of the woods, rather than stay there and meet again the man she had met the night before. She had sent the squaw away; she had arranged in Mrs. Huzzard’s tent a little game of cards that would hold the attention of Lyster and the others; and then she had slipped away, that she might, for just once more, feel free on the mountain, as she had felt when they first located their camp in the sweet grass of the Twin Springs.
The moon would be up after a while. She could not walk far, but she meant to sit somewhere up there in the high ground until the moon should roll up over the far mountains.
The mere wearing of the Indian dress gave her a feeling of being herself once more, for in the pretty conventional dress made for her by Mrs. Huzzard, she felt like another girl—a girl she did not know very well.
In the southwest long streaks of red and yellow lay across the sky, and a clear radiance filled the air, as it does when a new moon is born after the darkness. She felt the beauty of it all, and stretched out her arms as though to draw the peaks of the hills to her.
But, as she stepped forward, a form arose before her—a tall, decided form, and a decided voice said:
“No, ’Tana, you have gone far enough.”
“Dan!”
“Yes—it is Dan this time, and not the other fellow. If he is waiting for you to-night, I will see that he waits a long time.”
“You—you!” she murmured, and stepped back from him. Then, her first fright over, she straightened herself defiantly.
“Why do you think any one is waiting for me?” she demanded. “What do you know? I am heartsick with all this hiding, and—and deceit. If you know the truth, speak out, and end it all!”
“I can’t say any more than you know already,” he answered—“not so much; but last night a man was in your cabin, a man you know and quarreled with. I didn’t hear you; don’t think I was spying on you. A miner who passed the cabin heard your voices and told me something was wrong. You don’t give me any right to advise you or dictate to you, ’Tana, but one thing you shall not do, that is, steal to the woods to meet him. And if I find him in your cabin, I promise you he sha’n’t die of old age.”
“You would kill him?”
“Like a snake!” and his voice was harsher, colder, than she had ever heard it. “I’m not asking you any questions, ’Tana. I know it was the man whom you—saw that night at the spring, and would not let me follow. I know there is something wrong, or he would come to see you, like a man, in daylight. If the others here knew it, they would say things not kind to you. And that is why it sha’n’t go on.”
“Sha’n’t? What right have you—to—to—”
“You will say none,” he answered, curtly, “because you do not know.”
“Do not know what?” she interrupted, but he only drew a deep breath and shook his head.
“Tana, don’t meet this man again,” he said, pleadingly. “Trust me to judge for you. I don’t want to be harsh with you. I don’t want you to go away with hard thoughts against me. But this has got to stop—you must promise me.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then I’d look for the man, and he never would meet you again.”
A little shiver ran over her as he spoke. She knew what he meant, and, despite her bitter words last night to her visitor, the thought was horrible to her that Dan—
She covered her face with her hands and turned away.
“Don’t do that, little girl,” he said, and laid his hand on her arm. “’Tana!”
She flung off his hand as though it stung her, and into her mind flashed remembrance of Jake Emmons from Spokane—of him and his words.
“Don’t touch me!” she half sobbed. “Don’t you say another word to me! I am going away to-morrow, and I have promised to marry Max Lyster.”
His hand dropped to his side, and his face shone white in the wan glimmer of the stars.
“You have promised that?” he said, at last, drawing his breath hard through his shut teeth. “Well—it is right, I suppose—right. Come! I will take you back to him now. He is the best one to guard you. Come!”
She drew away and looked from him across to where the merest rim of the rising moon was to be seen across the hills. The thought of that other night came to her, the night when they had stood close to each other in the moonlight. How happy she had been for that one little space of time! And now—Ah! she scarcely dare allow him to speak kindly to her, lest she grow weak enough to long for that blind content once more.
“Come, Tana.”
“Go. I will follow after a little,” she answered, without turning her head.
“I may never trouble you to walk with you again,” he said, in a low, constrained tone; “but this time I must see you safe in the tent before I leave.”
“Leave! Going! Where to?” she asked, and her voice trembled in spite of herself. She clasped her hands tightly, and he could see the flash of the ring he had given her. She had put it on with the Indian dress.
“That does not matter much, does it?” he returned; “but somewhere, far enough up the lake not to trouble you again while you stay. Come.”
She walked beside him without another word; words seemed so useless. She had said words over and over again to herself all that day—words of his wrong to her in not telling her of that other woman, words of reproach, bitter and keen; yet none of her reasoning kept her from wanting to touch his hand as he walked beside her.
But she did not. Even when they reached the level by the springs, she only looked her farewell to him, but did not speak.
“Good-by,” he said, in a voice that was not like Dan’s voice.
She merely bowed her head, and walked away toward the tent where she heard Mrs. Huzzard laughing.
She halted near the cabin, and then hurried on, dreading to enter it yet, lest she should meet the man she was trying to avoid.
Overton watched her until she reached the tent. The moon had just escaped the horizon, and threw its soft misty light over all the place. He pulled his hat low over his eyes, and, turning, took the opposite direction.
Only a few minutes elapsed when Lyster remembered he had promised Dan to look after Harris, and rose to go to the cabin.
“I will go, too,” said ’Tana, filled with nervous dread lest he encounter some one on her threshold, though she had all reason to expect that her disguised visitor had come and gone ere that.
“Well, well, ’Tana, you are a restless mortal,” said Mrs. Huzzard. “You’ve only just come, and now you must be off again. What did you do that you wanted to be all alone for this evening? Read verses, I’ll go bail.”
“No, I didn’t read verses,” answered ’Tana. “But you needn’t go along to the cabin.”
“Well, I will then. You are not fit to sleep alone. And, if it wasn’t for the beastly snakes!—”
“We will go and see Harris,” said the girl, and so they entered his cabin, where he sat alone with a bright light burning.
Some newspapers, brought by the captain, were spread before him on a rough reading stand rigged up by one of the miners.
He looked pale and tired, as though the effort of perusing them had been rather too much for him.
Listen as she might, the girl could hear never a sound from her own cabin. She stood by the blanket door, connecting the two rooms, but not a breath came to her. She sighed with relief at the certainty that he had come and gone. She would never see him again.
“Shall I light your lamp?” asked Lyster; and, scarce waiting for
a reply, he drew back the blanket and entered the darkness of the other cabin.
Two of the miners came to the door just then, detailed to look after Harris for the night. One was the good-natured, talkative Emmons.
“Glad to see you are so much better, miss,” he said, with an expansive smile. “But you scared the wits nearly out of me this morning.”
Then they heard the sputter of a match in the next room, and a sharp, startled cry from Lyster, as the blaze gave a feeble light to the interior.
He staggered back among the rest, with the dying match in his fingers, and his face ashen gray.
“Snakes!” half screamed Mrs. Huzzard. “Oh, my! oh, my!”
’Tana, after one look at Lyster, tried to enter the room, but he caught and held her.
“Don’t, dear!—don’t go in there! It’s awful—awful!”
“What’s wrong?” demanded one of the miners, and picked up a lamp from beside Harris.
“Look! It is Akkomi!” answered Lyster.
At the name ’Tana broke from him and ran into the room, even before the light reached it.
But she did not take many steps. Her foot struck against something on the floor, an immovable body and a silent one.
“Akkomi—sure enough,” said the miner, as he saw the Indian’s blanket. “Drunk, I suppose—Indian fashion.”
But as he held the light closer, he took hold of the girl’s arm, and tried to lead her from the scene.
“You’d better leave this to us, miss,” he added, in a grave tone. “The man ain’t drunk. He’s been murdered!”
’Tana, white as death itself, shook off his grasp and stood with tightly clasped hands, unheeding the words of horror around her, scarce hearing the shriek of Mrs. Huzzard, as that lady, forgetful even of the snakes, sank to the floor, a very picture of terror.
’Tana saw the roll of money scattered over the couch; the little bag of free gold drawn from under the pillow. He had evidently been stooping to secure it when the assassin crept behind him and left him dead there, with a knife sticking between his shoulders.
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