"There! there! do yez shtop! No more for me; I've plenty," and the Irishman drew his sleeve across his eyes, as if he were wiping an undue accumulation of moisture, while Howard Brandon was scarcely less affected at the touching picture which he had drawn, and which he felt might be realized from his own remissness.
"I am sure I cannot tell which is for the best," he added in great perplexity. "If a prisoner, he may be able to get away."
"Yis, yees are right; some dark night he can give the owld haythen the slip, and make thracks for the river."
"And who knows but he has been able to elude them, and is only waiting until dark to hunt us up?"
"Yez are right agin; I was about to obsarve the same myself."
There was one view of the case, which if it did occasionally force itself upon the attention of Howard, he resolutely refused to utter a reference to it. It was that Elwood had been killed accidentally, or by the savages. That was too terrible a contingency to take definite shape until there was no escaping it, and as all of us know better we won't refer to it again.
"Then he may be in the power of these wandering Indians that took such an interest in the antelope we left lying down among the rocks."
"Yis; yez are correct sure."
"How is it, Tim, that you agree with every supposition I make, no matter bow different they are from each other?"
"Wal, you saas me mind is a little foggy, be the towken that I hasn't had the pipe atween me lips since yesterday. When I'm deprived of that pleasure I finds meself unable to reason clearly."