“But not ’hoodoos’ possessed of the tout ensemble of Miss Rivers,” objected Lyster. “You are simply trying to scare us—me, out of the journey I hoped to make with you to Helena. You are trying to evade a year of scholastic training we have planned for you, and you would like to prophesy that the boat will blow up or the cars run off the track if you embark. But it won’t. You will say good-by to your ogre of a guardian to-morrow. You will be guarded by no less a personage than my immaculate self to the door of your academy; from which you will emerge, later on, with never a memory of ’hoodoos’ in your wise brain; and you will live to a green old age and make clay busts of us both when we are gray haired. There! I think I’m a good healthy sort of a prophet; and as a reward will you go with me to-morrow?”
“With you? Then it is you who—”
“Who has planned the whole brilliant scheme? Exactly—the journey part of it at all events; and I’m not so modest as our friend here. I’ll take the blame of my share, and his, too, if he doesn’t speak up for himself. 125 Here comes your new friend, Dan. Where did you pick him up?”
It was the man Harris, and beside him was the captain. They were talking with some animation of late Indian raids to the westward.
“I doubt if it was Indians at all who did the thieving,” remarked Harris; “there are always a lot of scrub whites ready to take advantage of war signals, and do devilment of that sort, made up as reds.”
“Oh, yes—some say so! That man Holly used to get the credit of that sort of renegade work. Handsome Holly he was called once. But now that he’s dead, maybe we’ll see he was not the only one to work mischief between the whites and reds.”
“Holly? Lee Holly?” asked Lyster. “Why, didn’t we hear a rumor that he wasn’t dead at all, but had been seen somewhere near Butte?”
“I didn’t,” returned Overton, who was the one addressed, “though it may be so. He’s a very slippery specimen and full of schemes, from what I hear. But he doesn’t seem to range over this territory, so I’ve never run across him. It would be like him, though, to play dead when the Government men grew warm on his trail, and he’d no doubt get plenty of help from his Indian allies.”
Harris was watching him keenly, and the careless honesty of the speaker’s face and tone evidently perplexed him, for he turned with a baffled look to the girl, who stood with down-dropped eyes, and twisted a spray of leaves nervously around her fingers. He noticed one quick, troubled glance she gave Overton, but even to his suspicious eyes it did not seem a regard given a fellow-conspirator. 126
“I believe it was the doctor I heard speak of the rumor that Holly was yet above ground,” said Lyster. “The mail came up yesterday, and perhaps he found it in the papers. Don’t think I had heard of the man before. Is he one of the important people up here?”