Suppressing his elation Wilder smiled down at the woman, so helpless, so appealing in the terror she was unable to conceal.
“No,” he said almost gently. “I’m not Usak. I’m just a whiteman with two companions. Guess they’re white, too. You see, we came right on this place of yours without knowing about it. You don’t need to be worried. But I got to make a big talk with you before I quit. And seeing ther’s not a big diff’rence between day an’ night in this queer country do you feel like making that swell hall of yours below and sitting around for that talk? Do you? Both?”
Wilder’s gentleness was the outcome of an irresistible feeling of pity for the frightened woman. It had nothing to do with the thing he had in mind. The name of Usak was uppermost with him now, and he knew that one, at least, of these strange figures was in some way deeply connected with the ugly riddle it was his work to solve. His chivalry refused to associate the woman with it. It was different, however, with the man for all his terrible sightlessness. The man replied to him immediately and his voice was harsh and cold. Its tone was wholly uncompromising.
“We can talk,” he said shortly.
Wilder’s whole manner hardened on the instant. And his answer came sharply, and his tone was no less uncompromising than that of the other.
“That’s all right,” he said. “Lead the way down. And don’t forget ther’s a ‘forty-five’ gun right behind you all the way.”
Bill Wilder had long since learned the lessons of a country in which chance seemed to be the dominating factor of life. His hard schooling in the wide scattered goldfields of Yukon Territory had forced the conviction on him that chance was a better servant in this northern country than hard sense. And he knew now that sheer chance had flung him stumbling upon something that, if not actually the heart of the mystery of the murder of Marty Le Gros by the Euralians, was at least no mean key to it.
At the woman’s mention of the Indian, Usak, his mind had leapt back to the story which George Raymes had been able, however inadequately, to piece together from his old police reports. Usak, he remembered, was the husband of the squaw who had been murdered. These two people feared his coming so that they completely hid themselves at the approach of strangers. Usak had threatened them with his return. Therefore he had visited them before. For what purpose? They were frightened for their lives of him. Why should they be? Usak’s squaw had been murdered by—Euralians.
Surveying the sturdy back of the white-haired man, blinded, helpless, being led by the pathetic, devoted woman at his side, as he shepherded them to the hall below, he remembered once long ago, in his chequered career in Placer, to have seen a man whose eyes had been gouged in a bar-room fight. He remembered the hideous spectacle he had been left, and he knew that the man he had just discovered had endured the same terrible, inhuman, treatment. Usak? Was that the source of the terror he had inspired?