“I will see that you are left with good people,” he continued; “so don’t be afraid about that. I’m Dan Overton. Akkomi will tell you I’m square. I know where there’s a good sort of white woman who would be glad to have you around, I guess.”
“Is it your wife?” she demanded, with the same sullen, suspicious wrinkle between her brows.
His face paled ever so little and he took a step backward, as he looked at her through narrowing eyes.
“No, miss, it is not my wife,” he said, curtly, and then walked back and sat down beside the old chief. “In fact, she isn’t any relation to me, but she’s the nearest white woman I know to leave you with. If you want to go farther, I reckon I can help you. Anyway, you come along across the line to Sinna Ferry, and I feel sure you’ll find friends there.”
She looked at him unbelievingly. “She’s used to being deceived,” decided Overton, as she watched him; but he stood her gaze without flinching and smiled back at her.
“Do you live there?” she asked again, in that abrupt, uncivil way, and turned her eyes to Akkomi, as though to read his countenance as well as that of the white man,—a difficult thing, however, for the head of the old man was again shrouded in his blanket, from which only the tip of his nose and his pipe protruded.
In a far corner the squaw of Akkomi was crouched, her bead-like eyes glittering with a watchful interest, as they turned from one to the other of the speakers, and missed no tone or gesture of the two so strangely met within her tepee. Overton noticed her once, and thought 41 what a subject for a picture Lyster would think the whole thing—at long range. He would want to view it from the door of the tepee, and not from the interior.
But the questioning eyes of the girl were turned to him, and remembering them, he said:
“Live there? Well, as much—a little more than I do anywhere else of late. I am to go there in two days; and if you are ready to go, I will take you and be glad to do it.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” she protested.