“Faith! I’m glad you’re here, unhealthy as it is for you,” Kingdom answered. “What with Lone-Elk always just over my shoulder, and now with the snow on the ground, I don’t know how I’d ever have managed to get to you in the woods!” And so the boys fell to telling each other all that each had been doing and all that had happened since their last meeting.
Kingdom showed the greatest interest in the discovery of the bodies of the two men whom John had found dead under the brush heap at the salt springs. He inquired for every shred of information possible for John to give him, and tried his best to determine whether the murder had been committed by Indians or white men. If it was done by white persons, he declared, the slayer or slayers had at any rate tried to make it appear that Indians were the guilty ones. The carrying off the scalps of the dead and removing all valuables from the bodies indicated this.
“Still, I don’t see what it signifies, or how it makes any great difference to us, one way or another,” said John, as Ree intimated that he would have looked into the matter more thoroughly had it been he who made the discovery.
“Why, of course you do, John! Just think a minute! I’ve told you about seeing that camp in the little hollow and the salt spread out to dry. Now, then, where did that salt come from if not from the big ‘lick’? You mark my word that when we find out whose camping place that is, or was, we will know pretty well who did that killing. What we ought to do is to carry the whole story to Wayne’s men or to Fort Pitt; but it wouldn’t do any good to go there merely telling that we had found a couple of men dead. Persons are found dead along the border, somewhere, every day in the year. But if we could go to Wayne, or anyone else, and show them that the murderers were white robbers, and not simply sneaking redskins, there would be more of a chance to call somebody to account.”
“That’s so,” John answered rather thoughtfully, yet in a way which showed Ree that he did not quite understand.
“Why, certainly!” Kingdom exclaimed somewhat warmly. “If the camp I saw was the camp of the murderers, who is it likely that they are? British! That’s what! British from Detroit, over in this part of the woods for no good purpose—spying around Fort Pitt or stirring the Indians up to hostilities! And that camp I saw was a white man’s camp! Indians don’t care much about salt to begin with, and in the second place what white men would be traveling in this direction and carrying salt with them but some one headed for Detroit or some other settlement off that way?”
But having reached a conclusion that Indians, and no one else, were responsible for the two dead bodies beneath the brush pile, John could not easily get the notion out of his mind, and his interest in Kingdom’s speculations was therefore much less than ordinarily it would have been.
On the other hand Ree pieced together every scrap of evidence he could find—the stained glove that John had picked up, the indications he noticed that others had journeyed toward the “lick” from the west, and the certainty his own find presented that some one had lately obtained salt, presumably from the springs, in quite considerable quantities.
Extremely tired and too drowsy, now that he was in the midst of warmth and comfort again, to think much of the danger of his position, John fell into a doze on his bunk while Kingdom still pondered upon the salt springs mystery. In the darkness Ree did not at once notice that Jerome was asleep. Later he made the discovery and it was quite like him that he covered his friend over with a bearskin, and set himself to watch till daybreak.
It was fairly light when John awoke. Ree had already been out and the tracks he found showed that Lone-Elk had abandoned his watch. He had gone some time after it stopped snowing in the night, but there was no knowing when he might return.