The "Wild West" Collection. William MacLeod Raine
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it haunts like a ghost."
She looked up at him, and saw again that queer, wise smile about his lips.
"You don't believe he's dead!" she said, and her face grew paler. "You think he's still alive, and that is why you don't want folks to use your old name. You are laying for him yet, and you so helpless you can't move!"
The man only looked at her grimly. He would not deny; he would not assent.
"But you are wrong," she persisted. "He is dead. The Indians told me so--Akkomi told me so. Would they lie to me? Joe, can't you let the hate go by, now that he is dead--dead?"
But no motion answered her, though his eyes rested on her kindly enough. Then the squaw arose and slouched away to pick up firewood in the forest, and the girl arose, too, and touched his hand.
"Well, whether you can or not, I am glad I told you what I did. Maybe it won't worry me so much now; for sometimes, just when I'm almost happy, the ghost of that bad hate seems to whisper, whisper, and there ain't any more good times for me. I'm glad I told you. I would not have, though, if you could talk like other folks, but you can't."
She got him a drink of water, slipped their first find of the gold into his pocket, and then stood at the tent door, watching for Overton.
But he did not come, and after a little she picked up the pan again and started for the small stream where she had left him.
The man in the chair watched her go, and when she was out of sight, that right hand was again slowly raised from the chair.
"C--an't I?" he whispered, in a strange, indistinct way. "Poor lit--tle girl! poor little--girl!"
CHAPTER XIII.
THE TRACK IN THE FOREST.
Their camp was about a mile from the Kootenai River, and close to a stream of depth sufficient to carry a canoe; while, a little way north of their camp, a beautiful spring of clear water gurgled out from under a little bank, and added its portion to the larger stream that flowed eastward to the river.
There was a little peculiarity about the spring, which made it one to remember--or, rather, two to remember, for it was really a twin, and its sister stream slipped from the other side of the narrow ledge and ran north for a little way, and then turned to the east and emptied into the Kootenai, not a hundred yards from the stream into which its mate had run.
The two springs were not twenty feet apart, and lay direct north and south from each other. Then their wide curves, in opposite directions, left within their circle a tract of land like an island, for the streams bounded it entirely except for that narrow neck of rock and soil joining it to the bigger hills to the west.
It was in the vicinity of the two springs that the rude sketch of Harris bade them search; but more definite directions than that he had not given. He had marked a tree where the north stream joined the river; and finding that as a clew, they followed the stream to its source. When they reached the larger stream, navigable for a mile, they concluded to move their tents there, for no lovelier place could be found.
It was 'Tana and Overton who tramped over the lands where the streams lay, and did their own prospecting for location. He was surprised to find her knowledge of the land so accurate. The crude drawing was as a solved problem to her; she never once made a wrong turn.
"Well, I've thought over it a heap," she said, when he commented on her clever ideas. "I saw that marked tree as we went down to the Ferry, and I remembered where it was; and the trail is not hard if you only get started on it right. It's getting started right that counts--ain't it, Dan?"
There seemed fewer barriers between them in the free, out-of-door life, where no third person's views colored their own. They talked of Lyster, and missed him; yet Dan was conscious that if Lyster were with them, he would have come second instead of first in her confidences, and her friendly, appealing ways.
Whether he trusted her or not, she did not know. He had not asked a question as to how that survey of the land came to her; but he watched Harris sometimes when the girl paid him any little attention, and he could read only absolute trust in the man's eyes.
Overton was not given to keen analysis of people or motives; a healthy unconcern pervaded his mind as to the affairs of most people. But sometimes the girl's character, her peculiar knowledge, her mysterious past, touched him with a sense of strange confusion, yet in the midst of the confusion--the deepest of it--he had put all else aside when she appealed to him, and had followed her lead into the wilderness.
And as she ran from him with the particles of gold, and carried them, as he bade her, to Harris, he followed her with his gaze until she disappeared through the green wall of the bushes. Once he started to follow her, and then stopped, suddenly muttered something about a "cursed fool," and flung himself face down in the tall grass.
"It's got to end here," he said, aloud, as men grow used to thinking when they live alone in the woods much. Then he raised himself on his elbows and looked over the little grassy dip of the land to where the stream from the hills sparkled in the warm sun; and then away beyond to where the evergreens raised their dark heads along the heights, looking like somber guardians keeping ward over the sunny valley of the twin springs. Over them all his gaze wandered, and then up into the deep forest above him--a forest unbroken from there to the swift Columbia.
The perfect harmony of it all must have oppressed him until he felt himself the one discordant note, for he closed his eyes with a sigh that was almost a groan.
"I'll see it all again--often, I suppose," he muttered; "but never quite as it is now--never, for it's got to end. The little bits of gold I found are a warning of the changes to come here--that is the way it seems to me. Queer how a man will change his idea of life in a year or so! There have been times when I would have rejoiced over the prospect of wealth there is here; yet all I am actually conscious of is regret that everything must change--the place--the people--all where gold is king. Pshaw! what a fool I would seem to any one else if he knew. Yet--well, I have dreamed all my days of a sort of life where absolute happiness could be lived. Other men do the same, I suppose--yes, of course. I wonder if others also come in reach of it too late. I suppose so. Well, reasoning won't change it. I marked out my own path--marked it out with as little thought as many another fool; but I've got to walk in it just the same, and cursing back don't help luck. But I had to have a little pow-wow all alone and be sorry for myself, before turning my back on the man I'd like to be--and--the rest of my dreams that have come in sight for a little while but can never come nearer--There she comes again! I'm glad of it, for she will at least keep me from drifting into dreams alone."
But she appeared to be dreaming a little herself. At any rate, the scene she had passed through in the tent left memories too dark with feeling to be quickly dispelled, and he noticed at once the change in her face, and the traces of tears left about her eyes.
"What has hurt you?" he asked.
She shook her head and said:
"Nothing."
"Oh! So you leave here jolly enough, and run around to camp, and cry about nothing--do you?" he asked, with evident unbelief. "Were you crying for joy over those little grains of gold--or over your loneliness in being so far from the Ferry folks?"
She laughed at the mere idea of either--and laughter dispels tear traces so quickly from faces that are young. "Lonely!" she exclaimed: "lonely here? why, I feel a heap more satisfied here than down at the Ferry, where the whole place smelled like saw-mills and new lumber. I always had a grudge against saw-mills, for they spoil all the lovely woods. That is why I like all this," and she made a sweep of her arm, embracing all the territory in sight; "for in here not a tree has been touched with an ax. Lonely here! Why, Dan, I've been so perfectly happy that I'm afraid--yes, I am. Didn't you ever feel like that--just as if you were too happy to last, and you were afraid some trouble would come and end it all?"
But Overton stooped to lift the pick he had been using, and so turned his face away from her.
"Well, I'm glad you are not getting blue over lack of company," he remarked; "for we have only commenced prospecting, you know, and it