"What's this? Who was lost in the blizzard?" asked Mr. Peniman, who had entered the house in time to hear the last words.
Mrs. Peniman explained to him.
"Eagle Eye?" he ejaculated; "he must have been trying to come to us! He must have got lost in the storm! Perhaps he had some message to bring to us—perhaps he was not so ungrateful, so careless as he seemed——"
He stopped short, his eyes fixed with a strange stare upon the box that Ruth had entirely forgotten, and which she still clutched under her arm.
"Ruth!" he shouted, "where did you get that box? Where did it come from? How in the name of heaven——"
Ruth, startled half out of her wits at his face and voice, held out the box she had found on the prairies.
"I found it, Father—out there on the prairies—just a little way from where Eagle Eye was lying. Why, Father, what is the matter? What makes you look so—so——"
Her words died away as her father leaped forward and snatched the box from her hands. She saw him stoop and examine it, saw him stare into her mother's face, and saw her mother turn pale, as she murmured in a shaking voice, "The dispatch-box—the dispatch-box!"
Ruth had heard of the dispatch-box, although she had no remembrance of having ever seen it.
"The dispatch-box? Nina's dispatch-box—that we lost—that was stolen from us by the Indians?"