CHAPTER III. THE HEIR TO RATTLESNAKE GULCH.
For a moment or two after Abe finished his story there was silence. The old guide closed his eyes and leaned back upon the grass. It was not often that he spoke of the past, and the remembrance of that past brought a flood of bitter memories to his mind.
Dave, too, was thinking. He had heard some of the particulars of the life of the “Crow-Killer,” which were current topics in Southern Montana and along the Missouri; but that the great enemy of the Crow nation had married a daughter of that tribe was news to him. The “some things” that had occurred during the married life of the “Crow-Killer,” which he had not explained and barely mentioned in his story, puzzled Dave; it was evident that there was a mystery connected with the past life of Abe Colt, and that the “Crow-Killer” imagined that the Crows held the threads of that mystery, which one day they might unravel.
The thoughts of the two guides were interrupted just then by the approach of two members of the wagon-train. The two men were father and son; their names were, respectively, Eben and Richard Hickman. Eben was a man probably forty-five years of age, large and powerfully built, with an ill-looking, treacherous face, shifting, light-blue eyes, yellow hair and beard, his cheeks thin and hollow, and an expression of greed and cunning upon his features. The son, Richard, resembled the father in looks and build, only with a far better-looking face. His hair was cut short, and the expression upon his features was not an unpleasant one.
The father, Eben, was in business in a little mining town in Southern Montana, known as Spur City; the son had just come from the East, to join the father, who had met him at St. Paul.
“When do we start?” asked Eben Hickman, of the guides.
“To-morrow morning at four,” answered Dave.
“Do you think there is danger from Indians on the way?”