That Girl Montana

by Ryan, Marah Ellis

  “The very knife you had to-day!” said Lyster, horror-stricken at the sight.

  The miner with the lamp turned and looked at her strangely, and his eyes dropped from her face to her clasped hands, on which the ring of the snakes glittered.

  “Your knife?” he asked, and others, attracted by Mrs. Huzzard’s scream, stood around the doors and looked at her too.

  She nodded her head, scarce understanding the significance of it, and never taking her eyes from the dead man, whose face was yet hidden.

  “He may not be dead,” she said, at last. “Look!”

  “Oh, he’s dead, safe enough,” and Emmons lifted his hand. “Was he trying to rob you?”

  “I—no—I don’t know,” she answered, vaguely.

  Then another man turned the body over, and utter surprise was on every face; for, though it was Akkomi’s blanket, it was a much younger man who lay there.

  “A white man, by Heavens!” said the miner who had first entered. “A white man, with brown paint on his face and hands! But, look here!” and he pulled down the collar of the dead man’s shirt, and showed a skin fair as a child’s.

  “Something terribly crooked here,” he continued. “Where is Overton?”

  Overton! At the name her very heart grew cold within her. Had he not threatened he would kill the man who visited her at night? Had he come straight to the cabin after leaving her? Had he kept his word? Had he—

  “I think Overton left camp after supper—started for the lake,” answered some one.

  “Well, we’ll do our best to get it straight without him, then. Some of you see what time it is. This man has been dead about a half hour. Mr. Lyster, you had better write down all about it; and, if any one here has any information to give, let him have it.”

  His eyes were on the girl’s face, but she said nothing, and he bent to wipe off the stain from the dead man’s face. Some one brought water, and in a little while was revealed the decidedly handsome face of a man about forty-five years old.

  “Do any of you know him?” asked the miner, who, by circumstance, appeared to have been given the office of speaker—“look—all of you.”

  One after another the men approached, but shook their heads; until an old miner, gray-haired and weather-beaten, gave vent to a half-smothered oath at sight of him.

  “Know him?” he exclaimed. “Well, I do, though it’s five years since I saw him. Heavens! I’d rather have found him alive than dead, though, for there is a standing reward offered for him by two States. Why, it’s the card-sharper, horse-thief and renegade—Lee Holly!”

  “But who could have killed him?”

  “That is Overton’s knife,” said one of the men.

  “But Overton had not had it since noon,” said ’Tana, speaking for the first time in explanation. “I borrowed it then.”

  “You borrowed it? For what?”

  “Oh—I forget. To cut a stick with, I think.”

  “You think. I’m sorry to speak rough to a lady, miss but this is a time for knowing—not thinking.”

  “What do you mean by that?” demanded Lyster.

  The man looked at him squarely.

  “Nothing to offend innocent folks,” he answered. “A murder has been done in this lady’s room, with a knife she acknowledges she has had possession of. It’s natural enough to question her first of all.”

  The color had crept into her face once more. She knew what the man meant, and knew that the longer they looked on her with suspicion, the more time Overton would have to escape. Then, when they learned they were on a false scent, it would be late—too late to start after him. She wished he had taken the money and the gold. She shuddered as she thought him a murderer—the murderer of that man; but, with what skill she could, she would keep them off his track.

  Her thoughts ran fast, and a half smile touched her lips. Even with that dead body at her feet, she was almost happy at the hope of saving him. The others noticed it, and looked at her in wonder. Lyster said:

  “You are right. But Miss Rivers could know nothing of this. She has been with us since the moon rose, and that is more than a half-hour.”

  “No, only fifteen minutes,” said one of the men.

  “Well, where were you for the half-hour before the moon rose?” asked the man who seemed examiner. “That is really the time most interesting to this case.”

  “Why, good heavens, man!” cried Lyster, but ’Tana interrupted:

  “I was walking up on the hill about that time.”

  “Alone?”

  “Alone.”

  Mrs. Huzzard groaned dismally, and Lyster caught ’Tana by the hand.

  “’Tana! think what you are saying. You don’t realize how serious this is.”

  “One more question,” and the man looked at her very steadily. “Were you not expecting this man to-night?”

  “I sha’n’t answer any more of your questions,” she answered, coldly.

  Lyster turned on the man with clenched hands and a face white with anger.

  “How dare you insult her with such a question?” he asked, hoarsely. “How could it be possible for Miss Rivers to know this renegade horse-thief?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” said the man, drawing a long breath and looking at the girl. “It ain’t a pleasant thing to do; but as we have no courts up here, we have to straighten out crimes in a camp the best way we can. My name is Saunders. That man over there is right—this is Lee Holly; and I am sure now that I saw him leave this cabin last night. I passed the cabin and heard voices—hers and a man’s. I heard her say: ‘While I can’t quite decide to kill you myself, I hope some one else will.’ The rest of their words were not so clear. I told Overton when he came back, but the man was gone then. You ask me how I dare think she could tell something of this if she chose. Well, I can’t help it. She is wearing a ring I’ll swear I saw Lee Holly wear three years ago, at a card table in Seattle. I’ll swear it! And he is lying here dead in her room, with a knife sticking in him that she had possession of to-day. Now, gentlemen, what do you think of it yourselves?”

  * * *

  CHAPTER XXIII.

  GOOD-BY.

  “Oh, ’Tana, it is awful—awful!” and poor Mrs. Huzzard rocked herself in a spasm of woe. “And to think that you won’t say a word—not a single word! It just breaks my heart.”

  “Now, now! I’ll say lots of things if you will talk of something besides murders. And I’ll mend your broken heart when this trouble is all over, you will see!”

  “Over! I’m mightily afraid it is only commencing. And you that cool and indifferent you are enough to put one crazy! Oh, if Dan Overton was only here.”

  The girl smiled. All the hours of the night had gone by. He had at least twelve hours’ start, and the men of the camp had not yet suspected him for even a moment. They had questioned Harris, and he told them, by signs, that no man had gone through his cabin, no one had been in since dark; but he had heard a movement in the other room. The knife he had seen ’Tana take into the other room long before dark.

  “And some one quarreling with this Holly—or following him—may have chanced on it and used it,” contested Lyster, who was angered, dismayed, and puzzled at ’Tana, quite as much as at the finding of the body. Her answers to all questions were so persistently detrimental to her own cause.

  “Don’t be uneasy—they won’t hang me,” she assured him. “Think of them hanging any one for killing Lee Holly! The man who did it—if he knows whom he was settling for—was a fool not to face the camp and get credit for it. Every man would have shaken hands with him. But just because there is a little mystery about it, they try to make it out a crime. Pooh!”

  “Oh, child!” exclaimed Mrs. Huzzard, totally scandalized. “A murder! Of course it is a crime—the greatest.”

  “I don’t think so. It is a greater crime to bring a soul into the world and then neglect it—let it drift into any hell on earth that nets it—than it is to send a soul out of the world, to meet heaven
, if it deserves it. There are times when murder is justifiable, but there are certain other crimes that nothing could ever justify.”

  “Why, ’Tana!” and Mrs. Huzzard looked at her helplessly. But Miss Slocum gave the girl a more understanding regard.

  “You speak very bitterly for a young girl; as if you had thought a great deal on this question.”

  “I have,” she acknowledged, promptly; “you think it is not a very nice question for girls to study about, don’t you? Well, it isn’t nice, but it’s true. I happen to be one of the souls dragged into life by people who didn’t think they had responsibilities. Miss Slocum, maybe that is why I am extra bitter on the subject.”

  “But not—not against your parents, ’Tana?” said Mrs. Huzzard, in dismay.

  The girl’s mouth drew hard and unlovely at the question.

  “I don’t know much about religion,” she said, after a little, “and I don’t know that it matters much—now don’t faint, Mrs. Huzzard! but I’m pretty certain old married men who had families were the ones who laid down the law about children in the Bible. They say ’spare the rod and spoil the child,’ and then say ‘honor your father and mother.’ They seem to think it a settled thing that all fathers and mothers are honorable—but they ain’t; and that all children need beating—and they don’t.”

  “Oh, ’Tana!”

  “And I think it is that one-sided commandment that makes folks think that all the duty must go from children to the parents, and not a word is said of the duty people owe to the souls they bring into the world. I don’t think it’s a square deal.”

  “A square deal! Why, ’Tana!”

  “Isn’t it so?” she asked, moodily. “You think a girl is a pretty hard case if she doesn’t give proper respect and duty to her parents, don’t you? But suppose they are the sort of people no one can respect—what then? Seems to me the first duty is from the parent to the children—the duty of caring for them, loving them, and teaching them right. A child can’t owe a debt of duty when it never received the duties it should have first. Oh, I may not say this clearly as I feel it.”

  “But you know, ’Tana,” said Miss Slocum, “that if there is no commandment as to parents giving care to their children, it is only because it is so plainly a natural thing to do that it was unnecessary to command it.”

  “No more natural than for a child to honor any person who is honorable, or to love the parent who loves him, and teaches him rightly. Huh! If a child is not able to love and respect a parent, it is the child who loses the most.”

  Miss Slocum looked at her sadly.

  “I can’t scold you as I would try to scold many a one in your place,” she said, “for I feel as if you must have traveled over some long, hard path of troubles, before you could reach this feeling you have. But, ’Tana, think of brighter things; young girls should never drift into those perplexing questions. They will make you melancholy if you brood on such things.”

  “Melancholy? Well, I think not,” and she smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “Seems to me I’m the least gloomy person in camp this morning. All the rest of you look as though Mr. Holly had been your bosom friend.”

  She talked recklessly—they thought heartlessly—of the murder, and the two women were strongly inclined to think the shock of the affair had touched her brain, for she showed no concern whatever as to her own position, but treated it as a joke. And when she realized that she was to a certain extent under guard, she seemed to find amusement in that, too. Her expressions, when the cousins grew pitiful over the handsome face of Holly, were touched with ridicule.

  “I wonder if there was ever a man too low and vile to get woman’s pity, if he only had a pretty face,” she said, caustically. “If he was an ugly, old, half-decent fellow, you wouldn’t be making any soft-hearted surmises as to what he might have been under different circumstances. He has spoiled the lives of several tenderhearted women like you—yet you pity him!”

  “’Tana, I never knew you to be so set against any one as you are against that poor dead man,” declared Mrs. Huzzard. “Not so much wonder the folks think you know how it happened, for you always had a helping word for the worst old tramp or beggarly Indian that came around; but for this man you have nothing but unkindness.”

  “No,” agreed the girl, “and you would like to think him a romantic victim of somebody, just because he is so good-looking. I’m going to talk to Harris. He won’t sympathize with the wrong side, I am sure.”

  He looked up eagerly as she entered, his eyes full of anxious question. She touched his hand kindly and sat close beside him as she talked.

  “You want to know all about it, don’t you?” she asked, softly. “Well, it is all over. He was alive, after all, and I would not believe it. But now you need never trail him again, you can rest now, for he is dead. Somebody else has—has owed him a grudge, too. They think I am the somebody, but you don’t believe that?”

  He shook his head decidedly.

  “No,” she continued; “though for one moment, Joe, I thought that it might have been you. Yes, I did; for of course I knew it was only weakness would keep you from it, if you were in reach of him. But I remembered at once that it could not be, for the hand that struck him was strong.”

  He assented in his silent way, and watched her face closely, as if to read the shadows of thought thrown on it by her feelings.

  “It’s awful, ain’t it?” she whispered. “It is what I said I hoped for, and just yet I can’t be sorry—I can’t! But, after this stir is all over, I know it will trouble me, make me sorry because I am not sorry now. I can’t cry, but I do feel like screaming. And see! every once in a while my hands tremble; I tremble all over. Oh, it is awful!”

  She buried her face in her hands. Only to him did she show any of the feeling with which the death of the man touched her.

  “And you can’t tell me anything of how it was done?” she said, at last. “You so near—did you see any one?”

  She longed to ask if he had seen Overton, but dared not utter his name, lest he might suspect as she did. Each hour that went by was an added gain to her for him. Of course he had struck, not knowing who the man was. If he had known, it would have been so easy to say, “I found him robbing the cabin. I killed him,” and there would have been no further question concerning it.

  “But if all the other bars were beaten down between us, this one would keep me from ever shaking hands with him again. Why should it have been he out of all the camp? Oh, it makes my heart ache!”

  While she sat thus, with miserable thoughts, others came to the door, and looking up, she saw Akkomi, who looked on her with keen, accusing eyes.

  “No—it is not true, Akkomi,” she said, in his own jargon. “Keep silent for a little while of the things these people do not know—a little while, and then I can tell you who it is I am shielding, but not yet.”

  “Him!” and the eyes of the Indian turned to the paralytic.

  “No—not him; truly not,” she said, earnestly. “It is some one you would want to help if you knew—some one who is going fast on the path from these people. They will learn soon it is not I; but till then, keep silence.”

  “Dan—where?” he asked, laconically, and her face paled at the question.

  Had he any reason to suspect the dread in her own mind? But a moment’s thought reassured her. He had asked simply because Overton seemed always to him the controlling spirit of the camp, and Overton was the one he would have speech with, if any.

  “Overton left last night for the lake,” explained Lyster, who had entered and heard the name of Dan and the interrogative tone. Then the blanket was brought to Akkomi—his blanket, in which the man had died.

  “I sold it to the white man—that is all,” he answered through ’Tana; and more than that he would not say except to inform them he would wait for Dan. Which was, in fact, the general desire of the committee organized to investigate.

  They all appeared to be waiting for Dan. Lyster did not by any
means fill his place, simply because Lyster’s interest in ’Tana was too apparent, and there was little of the cool quality of reason in his attitude toward the mysterious case. He did not believe the ring she wore had belonged to Holly, though she refused to tell the source from which it had reached her. He did not believe the man who said he heard that war of words at her cabin in the evening—at least, when others were about, he acted as if he did not believe it. But when he and ’Tana chanced to be alone, she felt the doubt there must be in his mind, and a regret for him touched her. For his sake she was sorry, but not sorry enough to clear the mystery at the expense of that other man she thought she was shielding.

  Captain Leek had been dispatched with all speed to the lake works, that Seldon, Haydon, and Overton might be informed of the trouble in camp, and hasten back to settle it. To send for them was the only thing Lyster thought of doing, for he himself felt powerless against the lot of men, who were not harsh or rude in any way, but who simply wanted to know “why”—so many “whys” that he could not answer.

  Not less trying to him were the several who persisted in asserting that she had done a commendable thing—that the country ought to feel grateful to her, for the man had made trouble along the Columbia for years. He and his confederates had done ugly work along the border, etc., etc.

  “Sorry you asked me, Max?” she said, seeing his face grow gloomy under their cheering (?) assertions.

  He did not answer at once, afraid his impatience with her might make itself apparent in his speech.

  “No, I’m not sorry,” he said, at last; “but I shall be relieved when the others arrive from the lake. Since you utterly refuse to confide even in me, you render me useless as to serving you; and—well—I can’t feel flattered that you confide in me no more than in the strangers here.”

  “I know,” she agreed, with a little sigh, “it is hard on you, and it will be harder still if the story of this should ever creep out of the wilderness to the country where you come from—wouldn’t it?” and she looked at him very sharply, noting the swift color flush his face, as though she had read his thoughts. “Yes—so it’s lucky, Max, that we haven’t talked to others about that little conditional promise, isn’t it? So it will be easier to forget, and no one need know.”