Tooly's threatening talk ceased. Still Wood said nothing. In silence, Tooly mounted his horse, and with his fellows rode away, leaving the party of emigrants—most of them terror-stricken, some angry—standing dumb, looking at one another, and at the retreating three until they went out of sight, in the dusk of the desert night-fall: stood there on the sage-brush sward, a tableau of silent dumbfoundedness; for how long none knew; each waiting for something to break the spell.
"I feel like a fool," exclaimed Van Diveer.
"But," spoke Drennan, the older and more conservative leader of their party, "we couldn't start an open battle with those fellows without some of us being killed. They are gone; we should be glad that they are. It is better to bear the insult than have even one of our people shot."
"I'm glad they left no bullets in me—
Ulee, ilee, aloo, ee;
Courting, down in Tennessee."
This paraphrasing of his favorite ditty was, of course, perpetrated by "Jack."
But we all wished we knew. Was it true that these men were conspirators with the Indians who had been ravaging the emigrant trains? If so, doubtless they would be concerned in other and possibly much more disastrous assaults, and perhaps soon. If so, who would be the next victims?
But Mr. Wood was still too indefinite in his identification of the man Tooly—at least in his statement of it—to clear away all doubt, or even, as yet, to induce the majority of our men to act on the judgment of some: that we should follow these plainsmen, learn more, and have it out with them.
There were many circumstances pointing not only to the connection of these men with the assault on Mr. Wood's family, but to the probability of their having been responsible for the slaughter of the Holloway party. It seemed improbable that there were two bands of Indians operating along that part of the Humboldt River in the looting of emigrant trains. If it could be proved that white men co-operated with the savages in the Wood case, the inference would be strong that the same white men had been accessories in the Holloway massacre. The use of guns in those attacks, and the evident abundance of ammunition in the hands of the Indians, went far toward proving the connection of white men with both these cases.