“He said he was doing this on his own responsibility and was going to sell the news to a paper later,” explained Beatrice. “He thinks he is going to make some startling discovery.”
“I believe,” asserted Nancy wagging her head sagely, “that when he was young and his character was forming, his mother let him read too many detective stories and they didn’t agree with him. He thinks he is Sherlock Holmes and Craig Kennedy and all the others rolled into one. That is what is the matter with him.”
“You take a charitable view, Nancy,” returned her aunt, “and I rather think your diagnosis is right. But insistent, foolish people of his kind can often do a great deal of harm without intending it.”
Beatrice returned finally to the impatient Buck and rode down the path toward the gate. It was her intention to explore some of the upper trails of the mountainside to-day, for she had no desire to ride in the direction of the village. Once only had she been forced to go to town and she had felt very uneasy under the sullen unfriendly stares of the idle foreigners lounging about the doorways or sitting in rows at the edge of the board sidewalks.
She was to be delayed once more, however, by another visitor, one even more unwelcome than the first. She had dismounted to give a final jerk to the cinch of the girth and was about to swing into the saddle again to ride through the gate when she saw Thorvik come striding across the lowered bars. His face was red with the heat of his steep climb and the veins stood out on his forehead below his bristling tow-colored hair. Such a face she had never seen before, distorted with anger and flushed with evil hate. He pulled a letter from his pocket as he came near and held it up. Thinking that it was for her she stretched out her hand to take it, but he snatched it back beyond her reach.
“You are to look, not to have it,” he said in a voice thick with rage.
She saw it was addressed in a plain, schoolboy hand to “Mrs. Christina Jensen, Ely, Montana.”
“Why,” she cried, “it must be from——”
“From that Olaf,” snarled Thorvik, “and why should he be writing, if not because he has had an answer to his letter of long ago. I told her there should be no answer. Who wrote for her?”
“I did,” returned Beatrice steadily, although her hot temper was beginning to rise within her.