No reply—not even a sound.
"You smug-faced redskin! I wonder how much you're mixed in this."
"Indian no come more." The voice drifted from far away in the darkness on the trestle.
Sergeant Mahon lifted his head like a hound on the scent, then with a perplexed smile re-entered the shack.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE CONSCIENCE OF A BOHUNK
Tressa Torrance's outlook on life was a comfortable one, born of her own sunny nature. Its foundation was love, the keystone of its arch peace. The blood of a gentle mother had effectually subdued in her the fierce impetuosity of her father—as in life the frail little wife had dominated the boisterous husband. Tressa wanted most to be loved. It was food to her self-respect, to her easy and appealing ways, even to the laugh bubbling so readily to her rosy lips. Most of all she wanted to be loved by Adrian Conrad; her father—well, his love was impervious to influence.
In her gentle love of peace the bickerings that surrounded her made her shrink within herself, wondering, staunch in her faith that her daddy and Adrian were right—without these blundering, uneducated foreigners being quite as bad as their masters thought.
Desiring to escape it all for a time, she crept away one late afternoon when Adrian and her father were in conference with the two Policemen. They did not seem to notice. Less than a week ahead was the commencement of the last operation on the trestle before handing over to the big contractors complete; and the anxiety of the moment spoke in the firmness of their tone and the grimness of their measures. Tressa stole away, troubled at heart.
In her favourite retreat, a cluster of slender birch trees deep in the forest, she seated herself on a fallen trunk and unrolled her crocheting. Through the thin foliage the sun filtered over her hair and spangled the ground at her feet. A breeze as gentle as herself whispered above her head in friendly commune with the great rustle of the forest. Secluded without being closed in from the light, she felt that she might untangle there more clearly the trifling problems of her sheltered life.