"I can assure you, Miss Torrance, that there's not a grain of hope to raise. Whom does my friend resemble?"
"Why, Peter Maverick—just some ways."
For a moment he seemed startled, almost frightened, then he smiled indulgently.
"It only means they're both of Indian strain, have crooked eyes (a not uncommon combination), and happened to toy with the same invented name that is taken from the herds. Nothing more. . . . If I thought Blue Pete would throw himself through a window and down a bank like that at sight of me—"
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "He wouldn't, of course. But wouldn't it have been a story?"
"The sort of story that never happens even in books," he sighed.
CHAPTER XI
THE DESERTED CAMP
Three low taps sounded on the side of Koppy's shack. The underforeman rose and, standing well back in the gloom of the interior, peered through the open door to the boss's shack beside the grade. Then he went to the window that opened on the woods, swung it open, and without looking through whistled softly. Three men moved furtively across the opening and waited.
Koppy stepped to the door and carelessly examined the sky, drew tobacco and cigarette papers and rolled himself a smoke. Then, yawning lazily, he reached back and pulled the door shut and strolled away out of sight round the corner of the shack. With a nasty laugh to the three men waiting there he led the way back through the window.