“Hallo!” exclaimed Duncan, “where did you get hold o’ my knife?”
He stopped abruptly—a little confused in spite of himself. For the moment he had quite forgotten that the knife had been left in the camp where he had slain Perrin, and the sudden sight of it had thrown him off his guard. It was now too late to unsay the words, but not too late to mislead his hearers.
“I got it from Marie Blanc,” said Slowfoot with a look of surprise. “Does the knife belong to Cloudbrow?”
“I think it does. I’m almost sure it iss mine. Let me see it,” returned Duncan, taking the knife from the woman’s hand, and examining it with cool and critical deliberation.
“No,” continued he, “it iss not mine, but very like one that I lost—so like that I felt sure at first it wass mine.”
Men who lie, usually overact their part. Duncan glanced suspiciously at Dan to see how he took the explanation as he returned the knife to Slowfoot, and Dan observed the glance, as being uncalled for—unnatural—in the circumstances.
Dan was by no means of a suspicious nature, nevertheless the glance haunted him for many a day after that. Suspicion once aroused is a ghost which is not easily laid. He tried to shake it off, and he carefully, loyally, kept it confined in his own breast; but, do what he would, he could not banish entirely from his mind that Duncan McKay—the brother of his Elspie—had some sort of guilty knowledge of the murder of poor Henri Perrin.