"The dispatch-box?" Hannah Peniman's face whitened and her eyes grew dark with horror. "They have taken the dispatch-box? Oh, Joshua, that box had in it everything relating to the property and identity of that little girl!"
Her husband nodded.
"I know," he said. "It is a terrible catastrophe. I should have put that box in my own wagon."
"But who would have thought—who would have supposed that Indians——"
Neowage who had been looking and listening impassively, interrupted her.
"Indian no want papers."
Mr. and Mrs. Peniman started and looked at one another.
"True," said Joshua Peniman, pulling at his beard, "that is true, Neowage."
Presently he looked up at his wife with a troubled face. "There is more in this than we see now," he said in a low tone, and told her of the scrap of paper, the print of a white man's boot at the rear of the wagon, of the broken locks and opened trunks and scattered books and papers in the wagon.
"There is something very strange about it," he concluded. "Our own wagons were not disturbed, our horses were not taken; it almost looks to me as if the assault was made upon us to cover the rifling of the Carroll wagon."