“Safer to foller the Injun path. Whose your folks back in Virginny?”
Knight got to his feet and hurriedly told the names of his people. Kinsty worked inland and struck into the old trail. As he walked along in the lead he seemed hungry to be told things and asked many questions about Knight’s home life, his friends, and the like. Knight patiently answered the queries, as he had learned this was a characteristic of isolated people. The first four questions a traveler would be asked at a frontier cabin would be: “What’s your name? Where you from? Where you going? What’s your business?”
Knight talked until weary, and finally complained:
“Can’t we push forward faster? Seems like we was holding back.”
“No hurry so long’s we got to make one camp. Can’t do it on a stretch. Least-ways, you can’t. Won’t do to git tuckered out. You must be good for a long run if jumped by Injuns. You say you can’t speak nary a word of red lingo?”
“Not a word.”
Kinsty halted and stared at Knight thoughtfully. Then he announced:
“’Low you’re all right and are the man you say you be. But at the first I had a sneaking notion you might be Greeby.”
“The monster who lives with Indians from choice and kills his own people?” exclaimed Knight in a horrified tone. For the renegade’s infamous acts had been rehearsed at the Big Sandy station although the man seldom ventured that far up river.
“Now I know you’re all right,” chuckled Kinsty. “Only a man who’s all right could speak in that way. It was your scratched legs and arms that made me suspicious. Your calling like you did was the first thing to make me suspicious. Greeby is a master hand for yelling from the shore for some one to save his pelt by setting him across the river. Some say he’ll wade out in the water and pray to be took off.”