The two men stared vacantly at one another for a moment, and then with a common impulse sprang across the room and tore aside the hangings.
There was no one there. Nothing was revealed except the solid stone wall which formed that side of the room. Where could the emigrant have gone? He certainly had not come into the room, and neither could he have retreated through the wall. Julian stood transfixed.
“I know I saw him there,” said he, as soon as he could speak. “It beats me where he could have gone so suddenly.”
“That’s nothing,” replied Sanders. “You’ll be beat wuss than this if you stay in this rancho all night, I can tell you that.”
But the trapper’s actions indicated that it was something, after all, for as soon as he had satisfied himself that the emigrant had disappeared, he dropped the hangings as if they had been coals of fire, and snatching the lantern from the table retreated toward the door with all possible haste, with Tom close at his heels. Nor was Julian far behind the trappers when they reached the hall.
He did not wonder now that they were impatient to transact their business and leave the house. He would have been glad to leave it himself. His captors had told him that there were some “queer doings” in that rancho. Did they refer to scenes like this? Were people who, like this emigrant, had no business there, in the habit of walking about the house every night, and of vanishing after such a bewildering fashion when discovered; and was he to be compelled to remain there a witness to such proceedings.
The boy trembled at the thought. He was not superstitious. He knew that he had seen the face of a man peeping out from behind the hangings, and he believed, too, that his sudden and mysterious disappearance could be explained, and that there was nothing supernatural about it; but nevertheless he resolved that as long as he was allowed the free use of his feet he would not remain in a dark room in that house without company.
When the trappers retreated into the hall he went with them, and like them, kept his back turned toward the room, and impatiently awaited Pedro’s return. Nor was he obliged to wait long.
In a few seconds he heard a door open and close, a light flashed into the hall, and two men came hurrying toward him. One of them was Pedro, and the other was a tall, foreign-looking gentleman, in dressing-gown and slippers, who came along with a smile on his face, and his hand outstretched, as if about to greet some friend from whom he had long been separated.