“You did not see her?”
“No.”
“Would you have met had she gone to the station? Did you come from that direction?”
“No, I entered the ravine from the east by an old Indian trail.”
“And my rifle, my knife?” exclaimed Winthrop, glancing around the room, as though he expected to see his weapons in some corner.
“There were no weapons near you.”
“I have it at last—a clue to this mysterious attack,” exclaimed Winthrop, excitedly. “Miss Treveling has been carried off. The ruffians, whoever they are, shot me down that they might secure her.”
As he spoke, in Kate’s mind came the dreadful suspicion that her father, the renegade, might have had something to do with the attack on Winthrop; but then in an instant she dismissed the thought as unworthy of belief, for her father had not acted toward the wounded man as if he had been his assassin.
“There are many wild and dangerous characters on the borders of the Ohio. Men whose lawless lives have driven them from civilization to the forest wilds; yet I should not think that there would be any one of them desperate enough to seize upon General Treveling’s daughter, nor can I understand what they would gain by so doing.”
“You are sure that the attacking party were not Indians?”