The mysterious arrivals and disappearances of the redskin as Torrance saw them was interesting enough, but they were as nothing to Mahon compared with his own failure to meet the Indian face to face. That was epitomised in the incident of the voice from the darkness over the trestle the night he rushed to Torrance's assistance. There was little to connect Torrance's inexplicable Indian friend with the Indian bohunk who had dived that first day over the cliff to almost certain death, but Mahon had been living among inferences and deductions and a certain question was arising in his mind. Still it pointed nowhere.
Constable Williams had told him of isolated bands of Indians who had visited the camps during the previous summer, and Mahon conceived the idea that with one of these braves Torrance had had dealings which placed the redskin under obligation though the contractor himself might not suspect it. An Indian never forgets; that was the simplest explanation.
The secrecy of the Indian's movements might be accounted for by a natural reserve, and specially by a shyness before the uniform. But where was he hiding? That he was never far away was apparent. Mahon added to his other duties this new trail.
He realised the difficulty of his task after several distinct twinges of that strange sense developed in the wary at being under unseen eyes. It could not be a bohunk, for the workmen were not clever enough to trail him unseen. Also it was not an inimical inspection. Only the Indian could trail the trailer with such unerring confidence.
It was not unnatural, therefore, that as time went on the Indian assumed the proportions of a gripping mystery.
On the track of the new problem, Sergeant Mahon took to roaming the woods by night. His reward was unexpected and unsought—it had no connection whatever with the Indian. He discovered that the bohunks were meeting in their hundreds under cover of the darkness. To satisfy himself that an outside menace was not added to the perils surrounding the trestle, Mahon took to inspecting the camp from hiding whenever he came on one of these gatherings. The fact that they were composed of the ordinary bohunks of the camp, on some nights almost emptying it, relieved him.
He was turning his attention more directly to these meetings in the woods, when something happened to alter his plan.
CHAPTER XX
INDIAN OR POLICEMAN?
The tang of the northern evening drifted through the open door of the shack, within which the contractor lounged in his big arm chair, smoking hard but thinking harder. Near the table, bending to let the full light from window and door fall on her work, Tressa stitched at a rip in a disreputable old vest of her father's.