“No letter?” he asked.
“Didn’t you see it?” she laughed into his puzzled face. “Of course there was! Daddy has gone over yonder,” pointing to the ridge of hills sweeping upward into the westward mountains. “How do I know? Those pebbles were in a row, pointing east and west, with the biggest one at this end, the littlest, our ‘pointer,’ at the west end. And since there were five pebbles, he means to be gone about five days. No, he didn’t add a postscript saying what he was going for. We need sugar, and we need ammunition. Also—” with a little glance, purely feminine, at her skirt—“I shall want a new dress!”
“But,” suggested Farley, “there is no town, no camp near enough for him to get those things and be back in five days?”
“He is generally gone longer,” she admitted as she got back into the canoe and pushed off. “But it doesn’t matter what he went for, does it? You’ll have to put up with my sole company for the five days.”
CHAPTER VII
AFTER FIVE DAYS
The days passed swiftly and pleasantly for them—too pleasantly, Dick Farley told himself with something of bitterness. For what right had he to live from day to day in this quiet haven, lured out of himself, out of his black lonesomeness for his partner with that partner not a week dead?
It was true that his bruised side must have kept him in a forced inactivity, that he must have waited even as he was waiting. But he should have spent day and night with his thoughts of “squaring things for poor old Johnny,” not in wandering through the woods with a girl.
He told himself, as he lay unsleeping in the quiet night, that he should go; that he should go now that he could drag himself away from her; that he had no right to stay longer. Yet, where should he go? To pick up the trail which he had followed to the margin of the lake, and to follow it—where?
Would it bring him, after miles of winding, back to the cabin perched upon the tableland? Would he find at the end of that trail James Dalton, her father? Where was Dalton now? Why had he gone away so suddenly? Why had he said to her the other day, the day before Johnny was killed, that at last they could go back into the world which so long ago he had left behind him? Had he killed Johnny Watson? If not he, who then?
If Dalton had killed Watson, then Farley must kill Dalton. There was no other way; there could be no other way. He must kill the father of the girl who had brought him here and cared for him, who had saved him from dying alone and miserable—must kill her “dear old Daddy,” whom she loved so much, who had always been so good to her, who was all that she had in the world.