CHAPTER XXIII.
GOOD-BY.
“Oh, ’Tana, it is awful—awful!” and poor Mrs. Huzzard rocked herself in a spasm of woe. “And to think that you won’t say a word—not a single word! It just breaks my heart.”
“Now, now! I’ll say lots of things if you will talk of something besides murders. And I’ll mend your broken heart when this trouble is all over, you will see!”
“Over! I’m mightily afraid it is only commencing. And you that cool and indifferent you are enough to put one crazy! Oh, if Dan Overton was only here.”
The girl smiled. All the hours of the night had gone by. He had at least twelve hours’ start, and the men of the camp had not yet suspected him for even a moment. They had questioned Harris, and he told them, by signs, that no man had gone through his cabin, no one had been in since dark; but he had heard a movement in the other room. The knife he had seen ’Tana take into the other room long before dark.
“And some one quarreling with this Holly—or following him—may have chanced on it and used it,” contested Lyster, who was angered, dismayed, and puzzled at ’Tana, quite as much as at the finding of the body. Her answers to all questions were so persistently detrimental to her own cause. 290
“Don’t be uneasy—they won’t hang me,” she assured him. “Think of them hanging any one for killing Lee Holly! The man who did it—if he knows whom he was settling for—was a fool not to face the camp and get credit for it. Every man would have shaken hands with him. But just because there is a little mystery about it, they try to make it out a crime. Pooh!”