“I will stay,” he muttered. “I will stay as long as I am able to shoot. While I live they will never gain full possession of the valley. Merry left me here to guard this property, and I will do it with my life. But for Wiley’s carelessness——”
He stopped, suddenly struck by a startling suspicion.
“Was it carelessness?” he asked himself.
An instant later he was ashamed of the suspicion, for he remembered how on other occasions he had suspected Wiley, and each time had found himself wrong.
“No, no,” murmured Hodge; “it was simply a blunder, on Wiley’s part. He remembered Merriwell’s thirty, and thought he was doing the right thing in engaging men of similar calibre. The cap’n is on the level.”
Still troubled and perplexed by his thoughts, he grew, if possible, more fixed in his determination to defend the mines single-handed. He approached the cabin, the door of which was still standing open as he left it. Hurrying in, he stopped, suddenly turned to stone as he saw sitting on the floor, with his back against the wall, a human being, who was calmly smoking a long pipe.
A moment later the muzzle of Bart’s revolver covered this figure, which, however, did not stir or lift a hand. Coming, as he did, from the bright light outside into the shadows within the cabin, Hodge failed at first to note more than that the smoker who sat thus was wrapped in an old blanket. After a moment or two, however, he finally saw that he was face to face with an aged, wrinkled, leathery-skinned Indian. The little sharp eyes of the old savage were fixed steadily on Bart’s face, and he betrayed not a symptom of alarm as Hodge brought the rifle to bear upon him. With stoical calmness he deliberately pulled at his pipe.
“What in thunder are you doing here?” demanded Hodge, in astonishment.
“Ugh!” was the only reply vouchsafed.
Somehow that grunt seemed familiar. Bart had heard it before, but it simply increased his amazement. Lowering the rifle, he stared wonderingly.