“Maybe not, and few of them would be able, either, to do what we saw you do in this river yesterday,” he said kindly. “Dan is a judge of such things, you know, and he thought you very nervy.”
“Nervy? Oh, yes; I guess he’d be nervy himself if he was needed. Say! can you tell me about the camp, or settlement, at this Sinna Ferry? I never was there. He says white women are there. Do you know them?”
Lyster explained his own ignorance of the place, knowing it as he did only through Dan’s descriptions.
Then she, from her bit of Indian knowledge, told him Sinna was the old north Indian name for Beaver. Then he got her to tell him other things of the Indian country, things of ghost-haunted places and strange witcheries, with which they confused the game and the fish. He fell to wondering what manner of man Rivers, the partner of Dan, had been, that his daughter had gained such strange knowledge of the wild things. But any attempt to learn or question her history beyond yesterday was always checked in some way or other.
CHAPTER IV.
DAN’S WARD.
Mr. Max Lyster was not given to the study of deep problems; his habits of thought did not run in that groove. But he did watch the young stranger with unusual interest. Her face puzzled him as much as her presence there.
“I feel as though I had seen you before,” he said at last, and her face grew a shade paler. She did not look up, and when she spoke, it was very curtly: