She was disturbed over the footprints seen by the Indian woman—the track of a white man so close to their camp that day, yet who had kept himself from their sight! Such actions have a meaning in the wild 172 countries, and the meaning troubled her. While it would have been the most simple thing in the world to tell Overton and have him make a search, something made her want to do the searching herself—but how?
“I was right in my theory about the old river bed,” he said to her, as she poured his coffee. “Harris backs me up in it, and it was ore he found, and not the loose dirt in the soil. So the thing I am going to strike out for is the headquarters where that loose dust comes from.”
“Oh! then it was ore you found?” she asked.
Harris nodded his head.
“Ore on the surface—and near here.”
That news made her even more anxious about that stranger who had prowled around. Perhaps he, too, was searching for the hidden wealth.
When the supper was over, and the sun had slipped back of the mountain, she beckoned to the squaw, and with the water bucket as a visible errand, they started toward the spring.
But they did not stop there. She wanted to see with her own eyes those footprints, and she followed the Indian down into the woods already growing dusky in the dying day.
The birds were singing their good-night songs, and all the land seemed steeped in repose. Only those two figures, gliding between the trees, carried with them the spirit of unrest.
They reached an open space where no trees grew very close—a bit of marsh land, where the soil was black and tall ferns grew. The squaw led her straight to a place where two of the fern fronds were bent and broken. She parted the green lances, and there beside 173 it was a scraping away of the earth, as though some one walking there had slipped, and in the black sandy loam a shoe had sunk deep. The Indian was right; it was the mark of a white man, for the reds of that country had not yet adopted the footgear of their more advanced neighbors.