“Set against it? Oh, no.”
“Yes, you are. Mrs. Huzzard and all the camp would be only too glad to see her; but you—you say no. What’s your reason?”
“Joe, not many months ago you tried to make me suspicious of her,” said Overton, not moving his eyes from a distant blue peak of the hills. “You remember the day you fell in a heap? Well, I’ve never asked you your reasons for that; though I’ve thought of it considerably. You changed your mind about her afterward, and trusted her with the plan of this gold field down here. Now, you had reasons for that, too; but I never have asked you what they are. Do the same for me, will you?”
The other man did not answer for a little while, but he watched Dan’s moody face with a great deal of kindness in his own.
“You won’t tell me?” he said at last. “Well, that’s all right. But one of the reasons I want her back is to make clear to you all the unexplained things of last summer. There were things you should have been told—that would have made you two better friends, would have broken down the wall there always seemed to be 337 between you—or nearly always. (She wouldn’t tell you, and I couldn’t.) It left her always under a cloud to you, and she felt it. Many a time, Dan, she has knelt beside me and cried over her troubles to me—and they were troubles, too!—telling them all to me just because I couldn’t speak and tell them again. And I won’t, unless she lets me. But I don’t want to go over the range and know that you two, all your lives, will be apart and cold to each other on account of suspicions I could clear away.”
“Suspicions? No, I have no suspicions against her.”
“But you have had many a troubled hour because of that man found dead in her room, and his visit to her the night before, and that money she asked for that he was after. All such things that you could not clear her of in your own mind, when you cleared her of murder—they are things I want straightened out before I leave, Dan. You have both been good friends to me, and I don’t want any bar between you.”
“What does all that matter now, Joe? She is out of our lives, and in a happier one some one else is making for her. I am not likely ever to see her again. She won’t come back here.”
“I know her best; she will come if she is needed. I need her for once; and if you don’t send for her, I will, Dan. Will you send?”
But Overton got up and walked away without answering. Harris thought he would turn back after a little while, but he did not. He watched him out of sight, and he was still going higher up in the hills.