“I was watching him,” said Clare. “He didn’t seem to me like a bad man so much as like a child who’s got some wrong idea in his head.”
“That’s my idea too,” said Stonor. “One feels somehow that there’s been a bad influence at work lately. But what influence could reach away out here? It beats me! Their White Medicine Man ought to have done them good.”
“He couldn’t do them otherwise than good—so far as they would listen to him,” she said quickly.
They hastily steered away from this uncomfortable subject.
“Maybe Mary can help us,” said Stonor. “Mary, go among your people and talk to them. Give them good talk. Let them understand that we have no object but to be their friends. If there is a good reason why we shouldn’t go down the river let them speak it plainly. But this talk of danger and magic simply makes white men laugh.”
Mary dutifully took her way down to the tepees. She returned in time to get supper—but threw no further light on the mystery.
“What about it, Mary?” asked Stonor.
“Don’t go down the river,” she said earnestly. “Plenty bad trip, I think. I ’fraid for her. She can’t paddle a canoe in the rapids nor track up-stream. What if we capsize and lose our grub? Don’t go!”
“Didn’t the Kakisas give you any better reasons than that?”
Mary was doggedly silent.