“Sure enough. But now that I am here, we will not have any night watches on his part,” decided Lyster. “Between Miss Slocum and myself I think we can manage to do some very creditable nursing.”
“I am willing to do my best,” said Miss Lavina, with a shrinking glance toward Flap-Jacks, who just slouched past with a bucket of water; “but I must confess I do feel a timidity in the presence of these sly-looking Indians. And if at night I can only be sure none of them are very close, I may be able to watch this poor girl instead of watching for them with their tomahawks.” 201
“Never fear while I am detailed as guard,” answered Lyster, reassuringly. “They will reach you only over my dead body.”
“Oh, but—” and the timid one arose as if for instant flight, but was held by Mrs. Huzzard.
“Now, now!” she said reprovingly to the young fellow, “it’s noways good-natured of you to make us more scared of the dirty things than we are naturally. But, Lavina, I’ll go bail that he never yet has seen a dead body of their killing since he came in the country. Lord knows, they don’t look as if they would kill a sheep, though they might steal them fast enough. It ain’t from Dan Overton that you ever learned to scare women, Mr. Max; you wouldn’t catch him at such tricks.”
“Now I beg that whatever you do, Mrs. Huzzard, you will not compare me to that personage,” objected Lyster; “for I am convinced that anything human would in your eyes suffer by such a comparison. Great is Dan in the camp of the Kootenais!”
Mrs. Huzzard only laughed at his words, but Miss Lavina did not. She even let her eyes wander again to Akkomi, in order to show her disapproval of frivolous comment on Mr. Overton; a fact Lyster perceived and was immensely amused by.
“She has set her covetous maidenly eyes on him, and if she doesn’t marry him before the year is over, he will have to be clever,” he decided, as he left them and went to look up Haydon. “Serves Dan right if she did, for he never gives any other fellow half a chance with the old ladies. The rest of us have to be content with the young ones.”