He waited until Alan had read the few words on the bit of paper, watching closely the slight tensing of the other’s face. After a moment Alan dropped the paper, rose to his feet, and went to the window. There was no longer a light in the cabin where Mary Standish had been accepted as a guest. Stampede, too, had risen from his seat. He saw the sudden and almost imperceptible shrug of Alan’s shoulders.
It was Alan who spoke, after a half-mixture of silence. “Rather a missing link, isn’t it? Adds up a number of things fairly well. And I’m grateful to you, Stampede. Almost—you didn’t tell me.”
“Almost,” admitted Stampede.
“And I wouldn’t have blamed you. She’s that kind—the kind that makes you feel anything said against her is a lie. And I’m going to believe that paper is a lie—until tomorrow. Will you take a message to Tautuk and Amuk Toolik when you go out? I’m having breakfast at seven. Tell them to come to my cabin with their reports and records at eight. Later I’m going up into the foothills to look over the herds.”
Stampede nodded. It was a good fight on Alan’s part, and it was just the way he had expected him to take the matter. It made him rather ashamed of the weakness and uncertainty to which he had confessed. Of course they could do nothing with a woman; it wasn’t a shooting business—yet. But there was a debatable future, if the gist of the note on the table ran true to their unspoken analysis of it. Promise of something like that was in Alan’s eyes.
He opened the door. “I’ll have Tautuk and Amuk Toolik here at eight. Good night, Alan!”
“Good night!”
Alan watched Stampede’s figure until it had disappeared before he closed the door.
Now that he was alone, he no longer made an effort to restrain the anxiety which the prospector’s unexpected revealment had aroused in him. The other’s footsteps were scarcely gone when he again had the paper in his hand. It was clearly the lower part of a letter sheet of ordinary business size and had been carelessly torn from the larger part of the page, so that nothing more than the signature and half a dozen lines of writing in a man’s heavy script remained.
What was left of the letter which Alan would have given much to have possessed, read as follows: