“Why, Monte, the girl; Monte and Lee Holly. He’s somewhere alive—that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I was hunting for him when I found her laying low here, don’t you understand? You stare so. It is Lee Holly and— Ah—my—God!”
The last words were gurgled in his throat; his face whitened, and he sank to the ground as though his bones had suddenly been converted into jelly—a strange, shapeless heap of humanity as he lay at Overton’s feet. Overton bent over him, and after a moment of blank amaze, lifted the helpless head, and almost dropped it again, when the eyes, appealing and keenly conscious, met his own. There was a queer chuckling sound in the man’s throat; he was trying to speak, but could not. The secret he was trying to tell was buried back of those speechless lips, and one more stroke of the doom he feared had overtaken him.
CHAPTER X.
THE STRANGER’S LOVE STORY.
’Tana sat alone in her room a few hours later, and from the window watched the form of Ora Harrison disappear along the street. The latter had been sent by her father with some medicine for the paralyzed stranger, and the girls had chatted of the school ’Tana was to attend, and of the schools Ora had gone to and all the friends she remembered there, who now sent her such kind letters. Ora told ’Tana of the lovely time she expected to have when the steamers would come up from Bonner’s Ferry to the Kootenai Lake region, for then her friends were to come in the summers, and the warm months were to be like holidays.
All this girlish frankness, all the cheery friendship of the doctor’s family filled ’Tana with a wild unrest against herself—against the world.
“It would be easy to be good if a person lived like that always,” she thought, “in a nice home, with a mother to kiss me and a father I was not ashamed of. I felt stupid when they talked to me. I could only think how happy they were, and that they did not seem to know it. And Ora was sweet and sorry for me because my parents were dead. Huh!” she grunted, disdainfully, in the Indian fashion peculiar to her at times. “If she knew how I felt about it she’d hate me, I suppose. They’d all think I was bad clear through. They wouldn’t understand the reason—no 131 nice women like them could. Oh, if the school would only make me nice like that! But I suppose it’s got to be born in people, and I was born different.”
Even this reason did not render her more resigned; and, to add to her disquiet, there came to her the memory of eyes whose gaze made her shiver—the eyes of the stranger whom Overton had carried into the house for dead, but whose brain was yet alive. He had looked at her with a strange, wild stare, and Overton himself had turned his eyes toward her in moody questioning when she came forward to help. He had accepted the help, but each time she raised her eyes she saw that Dan was looking at her with a new watchfulness; all his interest in the stricken stranger did not keep him from that.