Merriwell had tried to keep his temper well in check, but he was growing more and more humiliated and angry. Some of the words dropped now and then by the deputies were peculiarly exasperating, but Merry knew how unwise and impolitic it would be to give these men any excuse for charging that he and his friends had “resisted officers in the performance of their duties.”
What hurt Merry more than anything else, though, was the conviction that was slowly being forced on him that John Caribou was not the honest man he had thought. The guide had been gone many hours, now, after leaving under circumstances that were strangely suspicious. Why did Caribou not return?
Merriwell recalled the exciting combat between the dogs and the deer on the lake, when he had saved the guide’s life. Had the guide forgotten that service so readily, after declaring that he could never forget it? It would seem so.
“But I shall not give up yet,” Merriwell concluded. “Things are looking black against John Caribou, but there may be a reasonable explanation for it all. It hurts me to lose confidence in a man in that way, and I shall not do it till I have to. He may have injured himself some way, or shot himself, for all we know.”
The game warden glanced at his watch.
“It’s getting dark in here pretty fast,” he observed. “I don’t see that we’re to gain much by all of us staying here longer. I shall stay, with Sam Best, to watch for that man. Dutchy may have been right, though I hardly think he was; but anyway, whoever hung up this moose meat, if it wasn’t our friends here, will come for it, and very likely to-night. I want to trap him.”
“Shall we leave the meat?” one of the deputies asked.
“Yes, just as it is. Get us something up to eat and send it over right away.”
Some of the deputies were still scurrying round through the undergrowth.
Merriwell chanced at that moment to glance toward Dunnerwust, and was bewildered by the look that he saw come into the Dutch boy’s face.