“Yes—I’m only an adopted son.”
Unconsciously she had been letting her voice fall low, making their chat more confidential. She awoke to this now and to the fact that he had done the same, by noting that he raised his voice at this time with a casual glance past her to where her father sat.
“Yes—you see my own father and mother were killed when I was eight years old, and the people that murdered them tried to kill me too, but I was a spry little tike and give them the slip. It was a bad country, and I like to have died, only there was a band of Navajos out trading ponies, and one morning, after I’d been alone all night, they picked me up and took care of me. I was pretty near gone, what with being scared and everything, but they nursed me careful. They took me away off to the south and kept me about a year, and then one time they took me with them when they worked up north on a buffalo hunt. It was at Walnut Creek on the big bend of the Arkansas that they met Ezra Calkins coming along with one of his trains and he bought me of those Navajos. I remember he gave fifty silver dollars for me to the chief. Well, when I told him all that I could remember about myself—of course the people that did the killing scared a good deal of it out of me—he took me to Kansas City where he lived, and went to law and made me his son, because he’d lost a boy about my age. And so that’s how we have different names, he telling me I’d ought to keep mine instead of taking his.”
She was excited by the tale, which he had told almost in one breath, and now she was eager to question, looking over to see if her father would not also be interested; but the latter gave no sign.
“You poor little boy, among those wretched Indians! But why were your father and mother killed? Did the Indians do it?”
“No, not Indians that did it—and I never did know why they killed them—they that did do it.”
“But how queer! Don’t you know who it was?”
Before answering, he paused to take one of the long revolvers from its holster, laying it across his lap, his right hand still grasping it.
“It was tiring my leg where it was,” he explained. “I’ll just rest myself by holding it here. I’ve practised a good smart bit with these pistols against the time when I’d meet some of them that did it—that killed my father and mother and lots of others, and little children, too.”
“How terrible! And it wasn’t Indians?”