“Have you murdered him?” she gasped, looking at him wildly.
“I am not a murderer,” was the calm answer. “He tried to escape from my men while I was basking in the sunlight of your smiles, and got hit. That is all I know about it.”
“I will remember how it was done,” cried Myrtle, with a lurid gleam in her beautiful eyes. “But I will speak to you no more until the time comes for you to die.”
He took her hand again and led her by wild paths across the mountain, until she was nearly ready to sink from fatigue. Through all this, he had shown a certain chivalrous care of her which was hardly to be looked for after all that had happened. When he saw that she was tired, he stopped and pulled moss from the rocks, which he spread to make her a couch.
“Do not fear me,” he said, as she seemed to shrink from his touch. “I would not do you a wrong, for I worship the ground your feet have trod.”
“It may be so,” she said, quietly. “Let us say that you really love me, then. But, do you not take a strange way of showing it?”
“I will change all that,” he cried. “Look you, Myrtle Forrester—you start at the name, do you?—I will show you that I know more of you than you suppose. On the fourteenth of June, twelve years ago, a train was run into by Sioux on the plain toward the Three Buttes. It was supposed that every person was killed, but as it turned out, an old prairie-man, known as Old Pegs, was some miles from camp, having in charge a child six years of age, the daughter of an Indian agent named Forrester, who was going to Bent’s Fort. These two were all who escaped, and Old Pegs came back to find the camp in ruins, and every man and woman killed and scalped.”
“You know all this? Will you tell me how it came to your knowledge?”
“No matter; I know that it is true, and so do you. Forrester was not quite dead, and after leaving his daughter to the care of Old Pegs, with an injunction to guard her as his life, Forrester died. Old Pegs kept his word, and Myrtle Forrester is now my prisoner, and destined soon to be my wife.”
“You dare not say that my brave guardian did not keep his promise well,” cried Myrtle. “No father could be more tender or true than he has been to me, and I can not bring myself to think that he has been foully murdered.”