CHAPTER XXXII.
REVENGE OF PRICE.
Before the final downfall of Price he had been deeply interested in the beautiful sister of the wife of Doctor Karl Griffin, of Bozeman. Although he received no encouragement from the young lady, Miss Dorothy Reed—called Dot—he took it upon himself to feel encouraged, and had been a frequent visitor at the doctor’s residence.
Doctor Griffin had no love for the Indian agent, but as the latter had large influence and was constant in his manifestations of good will, he felt obliged to tolerate the agent’s presence in his household.
The doctor’s wife and Miss Reed also were politely tolerant only. They had heard much of the character of Price, and concerning their approval or disapproval it is only necessary to say that both were highly respectable and intelligent young ladies. Both were graduates of an Eastern college and reared in a good old Virginia home.
The doctor, after receiving his diploma from McGill University and serving a year in a New York hospital, married Miss Clarice Reed and went West for health and fortune, and to devote himself to his profession.
Miss Dottie Reed, after graduation, had come to pay her sister an extended visit. She loved the big West with its possibilities. It made the East seem narrow, and pinched, and crowded. She loved the purple haze of mountains and the greenish brown of the plains. From Castle Rock to the gorges of the Bridger Range she loved the wild, free life with its crudeness and roughness of the unhewn block of civilization.
And Price, coarse as he was, dishonest as he was, and generally bad as he was, first admired, then respected, and finally entertained a warmer emotion for the gay little college girl.
Such were conditions in that part of Bozeman that centred around young Doctor Griffin and his family, when Lieutenant Avery, just out from West Point, arrived on the scene.