"Tell me--what is it?" he demanded. "'Tana, speak to me!"
She did not speak, but a rustle in the bushes above them caught his ear; and looking up, he saw a form pass lightly through the shadows and away from them. He could not tell whether it was an Indian, a white man, or even an animal scampering off that way through the bushes. But anything that spied like that and ran when discovered was a thing to shoot at. He dropped his hand to his revolver, but she caught his arm.
"No, Dan! Oh, don't--don't shoot him!"
He stared at her, conscious that it was no ordinary fear that whitened her face. What did it mean? She herself had just come from the woods--pale, agitated, and with only a semblance of flower gathering to explain her absence. Had she met some one there--some one who--
He let go of her and started to run up the side of the steep bank; but swiftly as he moved, she caught him and clung to him, half sobbing.
"Don't go! Oh, Dan, let him go!" she begged, and her grasp made it impossible for him to go unless he picked her up and carried her along.
He stooped, took her head roughly in his hands, and turned her face up, so that the light would fall upon it.
"_Him!_ Then you know who it is?" he said, grimly. "What sort of business is this, 'Tana? Are you going to tell me?"
But she only crouched closer to him, and, sobbing, begged him not to go. Once he tried to break away but lost his footing, and the soil and bits of boulders went clattering down past her.
With a muttered oath of impatience, he gave up the pursuit, and stared down at her with an expression more bitter than any she had ever seen on his face before.
"So you are bound to protect him, are you?" he asked, coldly. "Very well. But if you value him so highly you had better keep him clear of this camp, else he'll find himself ready for a box. Come! get up and go to the tents. That is a better place for you than here. Your coming out here this evening has been a mistake all around--or else mine has. I wish to Heaven I could undo it all."
She stood a little apart from him, but her hand was still outstretched and clasping his arm.
"All, Dan?" she asked, and her mouth trembled. But his own lips were firm enough, as he nodded his head and looked at her.
"All," he said briefly. "Go now; and here are your flowers for which you hunted so long in the woods."
He stooped to pick them up for her from where they had fallen--the white, fragrant things he had thought so beautiful as she came toward him with them in the moonlight.
But as he lifted them from the bank, where they were scattered, he saw something else there which was neither beautiful nor fragrant, but over which he bent with earnest scrutiny. An ordinary looking piece of shale or stone it would have seemed to an inexperienced eye, a thing with irregular veins of a greenish appearance, and the green dotted plainly with yellow--so plainly as to show even in the moonlight the nature of the find.
He turned to the girl and reached it to her with the flowers.
"There! When my foot slipped I broke off that bit of 'float' from the ledge," he said curtly. "Show it to Harris. We have found the gold ore, and I'll stake out the claims to-night. You can afford to leave for civilization now as soon as you please, I reckon, for your work in the Kootenai country is over. Your fortune is made."
CHAPTER XIV.
NEW-COMERS.
Many days went by after that before more time was given to the hunting of gold in that particular valley of the Kootenai lands; for before another day broke, the squaw spoke at the door of Overton's tent and told him the girl was sick with fever, that she talked as a little child babbles and laughs at nothing.
He went with her, and the face he had seen so pale in the moonlight was flushed a rosy red, and her arms tossed meaninglessly, while she muttered--muttered! Sometimes her words were of the gold, and of flowers. He even heard his name on her lips, but only once; and then she cried out that he hurt her. She was ill--very ill; he could see that, and help must be had.
He went for it as swiftly as a boat could be sped over the water. During the very short season of waiting for the doctor and Mrs. Huzzard, he wrote to Lyster, and secured some Indians for work needed. If the doctor thought her able for the journey, he meant to have her brought back in a boat to Sinna Ferry, where she would have something more substantial than canvas walls about her.
But the doctor did not. He was rather mystified by her sudden illness, as there had been no forewarnings of it. That it was caused by some shock was possible; and that it was serious was beyond doubt.
The entire party, and especially Mrs. Huzzard, were taken aback by finding a newly arrived, self-imposed guardian at the door of Tana's tent. It was the blanket-draped figure of old Akkomi, and his gaily painted canoe was pulled up on the bank of the creek.
"I heard on the wind the child was sick," he said briefly to Overton. "I come to ask if you needed help."
But Overton looked at him suspiciously. It was impossible that he could have heard of her illness so soon, though he might have heard of her presence there.
"Were any of your people here at nightfall yesterday?" he asked. The old fellow shook his head.
"No, none of my people," he said briefly; then he puffed away at his pipe, and looked approvingly at Mrs. Huzzard, who tried to pass him without turning her back to him at all, and succeeded in making a circuit bearing some relation to progress made before a throne, though the relationship was rather strained. His approving eyes filled her with terror; for, much as she had reveled in Indian romances (on paper) in her youth, she had no desire to take any active part in them in her middle age.
And so, with the help of the doctor and Mrs. Huzzard, they commenced the nursing of 'Tana back to consciousness and health. Night after night Dan walked alone in the waning moonlight, his heart filled with remorse and blame for which he could find no relief. The gathering of the gold had no longer allurements for him.
But he moved Harris' tent on to one of the claims, and he cut small timber, and in a day and a half had a little log house of two rooms put up and chinked with dry moss and roofed with bark, that 'Tana might have a home of her own, and have it close to where the ore streaked with gold had been found. Then he sent the Indians up the river again, and did with his own hands all labor needed about the camp.
"You'll be sick yourself, Overton," growled the doctor, who slept in the tent with him, and knew that scarce an hour of the night passed that he was not at the door of 'Tana's cabin, to learn if any help was needed, or merely to stand without and listen to her voice as she spoke.
"For mercy's sake, Mr. Dan, do be a little careful of yourself," entreated Mrs. Huzzard; "for if you should get used up, I don't know what I ever would do here in this wilderness, with 'Tana and the paralyzed man and you to look after--to say nothing of the fear I'm in every hour because o' that nasty beast of an Indian that you say is a chief. He is here constant!"
"Proof of your attractive powers," said Overton, reassuringly. "He comes to admire you, that is all."
"And enough, too! And if it wasn't for you that's here to protect me, the good Lord only knows whether I'd ever see a milliner shop or a pie again, as long as I lived. So I am set on your taking more care of yourself--now won't you?"
"Wait until you have cause, before you worry," he advised, "I don't look like a sick man, do I?"
"You don't look like a well one, anyway," she said, looking at him carefully; "and you don't look as I ever saw you look before. You are as hollow eyed as though you had been sick yourself for a month. Altogether, I think your coming out here to camp in the wild woods has been a big mistake."
"It looks like it just now," he agreed, and his eyes, tired and troubled, looked past her into the cabin where 'Tana lay. "Does she seem better?"
"Just about the same. Eight days now since she was took down; and the doctor, he