“In there, I reckon. We all sat late last night around the fire.”
“Huh! Mighty social, ain’t you? Had any trouble with that girl?”
Rafe frowned and shook his head.
“Well, get ’em out of the tall grass,” commanded Sisson. “I want to see ’em.”
Rafe went to the tent door and called, but Bet was sleeping heavily, and her son, looking at her jaded face, hesitated to arouse her. It was Azalea whom Sisson wanted to see, and Rafe said to himself that Sisson would have to treat her well, or there would be trouble. He could see the girl’s bed bunched up as if she were rolled underneath the bed clothes, but when he called there was no answer, and at last, half frightened, he went over to awaken her. But when he got closer he discovered there was no one in the bed. The clothes were tossed up as if some one lay there, and he saw at a glance that they had been purposely made to look that way. For a minute his heart sank; and then, suddenly, with a strange new unselfishness, it lightened. Azalea had slipped from Sisson’s clutches after all. Rafe drew his belt a little tighter, pushed his hat on the back of his head, and going out, faced the company.
“The girl’s lit out,” he said briefly.
“What?” screamed Sisson. And before Rafe could say more, a man—the tallest, it seemed to Rafe, that he ever had set his eyes upon, came stalking around from behind one of the wagons. He was hatless, and revealed a startling shock of hair, and underneath his arm he carried a fiddle in its case.
“What you say, you speckled cub?” he roared.
“The girl’s lit out,” Rafe repeated. He grinned at them cheerfully, and was still grinning as Sisson advanced with fight in his eye.
“Ain’t you onto your job any better than that?” he yelled, still coming on. Rafe looked almost languid as he watched him, but just as Sisson got ready for a rush at him, the great arm of the young mountaineer shot forward, striking his “boss” cleanly between the eyes. And down in the dust went the head of the Sisson All Star Combination. Every one except the man with the violin laughed. He seemed hardly to have noticed Sisson’s downfall. He turned his piercing eyes on the young man and said in a voice as cold and keen as a sword-edge: