“He told you so himself!” the man echoed. “When did he tell you? When did you see him?”
“I was alone with him for twelve hours in the desert.”
“Alone with you?” His puzzled face showed how he was trying to take this in, “I don't understand. How could he be alone with you?”
“I thought he was my brother and I was helping him to escape from Fort Lincoln.”
“Helping him to escape! Helping Wolf Struve to escape! Well, I'm darned if that don't beat my time. How come you to think him your brother?” the man asked suspiciously.
“It doesn't matter how or why. I thought so. That's enough.”
“And you were alone with him—why, you must have been alone with him all night,” cried Dunke, coming to a fresh discovery.
“I was,” she admitted very quietly.
A new suspicion edged itself into his mind. “What did you talk about? Did he say anything about—Did he—He always was a terrible liar. Nobody ever believed Wolf Struve.”
Without understanding the reason for it, she could see that he was uneasy, that he was trying to discount the value of anything the convict might have told her. Yet what could Struve the convict, No. 9,432, have to do with the millionaire mine-owner, Thomas J. Dunke? What could there be in common between them? Why should the latter fear what the other had to tell? The thing was preposterous on the face of it, but the girl knew by some woman's instinct that she was on the edge of a secret Dunke held hidden deep in his heart from all the world. Only this much she guessed; that Struve was a sharer of his secret, and therefore he was set on lynching the man before he had time to tell it.