She was turning to leave him when he said—'One moment longer. I am in no way acting for myself, but solely for her. My leave is nearly up, and I shall probably return direct to India, in which case I shall not be back in England for another eight or ten years, and she may be married before as many months are passed—may indeed be married now for aught I know. It is for my girl friend that I have been working, not for the woman that I love. You and I are friends now, and were you in difficulty or trouble you could count upon me to do my best for you as I have been doing for her.'
She waved her hand in scornful repudiation of any claim upon him, and went swiftly back to the tent.
'Anything wrong, Captain?' Jacob asked, as he returned to the fire.
'Not worse than might be expected, Jacob. I have spoken to her, told her who I am, and why I came here. Naturally enough, she is sore at present, and considers that I have been deceiving her, which is true enough. At first she denied nothing, but afterwards fired up, and for the present regards me as an enemy; but I believe it will all come right. She is angry now because it seems to her that I have been taking her in for my own purposes, but I think that when she thinks it over calmly she will do what I want.'
Just as Ned Hampton was thinking of turning in for the night a man came up to the fire. He recognised him at once as Murdoch, Truscott's partner in the saloon.
'I have come round to have a bit of a talk with you,' the man said, as he seated himself on a box near the fire. 'Linda has been telling me that you are the man I saw at New Orleans, and that you followed us here. She has also been telling me what you came for, and the girl is downright cut up about it. Up till now I have never known the rights of the job she and Warbles had done in England. She has not told me much about it now, only that she acted the part of another girl and got things in her name, and that the other girl has been suspected of it, and that you want to clear her. Now when I first saw her at New Orleans I took an oath I would do what I could for her, and would see that she was not wronged in any way. I have been watching her pretty close for some time. I could see she liked you. If you had pretended to be fond of her so as to wheedle her into doing what you wanted in this business, and had then chucked her over, I would have thought no more of shooting you than I would of putting my heel on a rattler's head; but I am bound to say that you haven't. I could see that whatever your game was, you were not trying to make her like you; and when I said something about it, when she was talking to me, she flared up and said that you had never been more than civil to her, and there was no thought of love between you.
'I don't think she quite spoke the truth on her side, but that was only natural. Anyhow, I don't feel any grudge against you, and it is only to make things best for her that I have come here. There is nothing hardly I would not do for her, and I want to make things as smooth as possible. You behaved like a man in that affair with Wyoming Bill, and I guess as you are at the head of Judge Lynch's band, and I look upon you as a straight man, and I am not afraid of talking straight to you. It was I who set that nigger on you at New Orleans. I knew nothing about you except that you would have spoilt our plans, and might even get her arrested. Your life was nothing to me one way or another; I had got to stop you and I did it. I told the nigger to hit you so that you would be laid up for a time, but not to kill you; but when I did so I tell you I didn't care the turn of a straw whether he killed you or not. I have been thinking over for the last hour what I had best do, and I concluded to come to you and put it to you straight.
'Warbles is pretty nigh rubbed out; I doubt if he will get round; he takes a lot of liquor every night, and always has done, and that tells against a man's chances when he is hurt. You know well enough that you could do nothing against the girl here. If a sheriff came to arrest her the boys would pretty well tear him to pieces, but the chap that could travel as you have done, from England to the States, and then across to California, would certainly be ready to wait and bide his time, and sooner or later you would catch her.'
'I have no wish to catch her,' Ned Hampton said. 'I have told her so. I believe that she has been deceived throughout by this man Warbles, who is, I know, a very bad lot. I have a strong admiration for her; in person she marvellously resembles a lady to whom I am much attached, and the manner in which she behaves here and remains untouched by the admiration she excites is admirable, and I am convinced that she acted in England solely under Warbles' influence and without any knowledge or thought of the harm she was doing. I am anxious—most anxious—to obtain a written confession from her that would clear the reputation of the lady she impersonated, but if she will not make that confession I shall certainly take no steps whatever against her or put the law in motion to bring about her arrest.'
'That is well spoken, sir, and if I can help you I will. If Warbles dies I shall do my best to be a father to the girl until the time comes when she will choose a husband for herself. I have been a pretty bad man in my time, and in most things she could hardly have a worse guardian, but at any rate I will watch over and keep her from harm, and would shoot down any man who insulted her as I would a dog. That is all I have got to say now. I hope you don't bear any ill will for that job at New Orleans, but I will tell you fairly, I would have done it again here had I thought you were coming to try to win her heart just for your purposes, or you had been scheming to get her arrested and sent to England to be punished.'