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"Aren't you extravagant?" asked Tressa slyly. He regarded his daughter with an injured expression. "You take all the pleasure from my bargains, Tressa. Make it three dollars a day, Big Chief. It sort of makes a man reckless to have his own detective force." The Indian waited patiently until the torrent of talk ceased. "Indian take no pay," he said stolidly. The contractor rubbed his chin.
Constable Williams cleared his throat. Torrance was silent. Tressa leaned forward and touched Mahon's sleeve. "You didn't bury him in a cemetery? He'd hate it." "We never found his body. Mira Stanton, the girl I told you of, buried him where we never could find. She wrote us . . . and she hated us. There's a rough stone to his memory down there on the edge of the Cypress Hills.
No reply not even a sound. "You smug-faced redskin! I wonder how much you're mixed in this." "Indian no come more." The voice drifted from far away in the darkness on the trestle. Sergeant Mahon lifted his head like a hound on the scent, then with a perplexed smile re-entered the shack. Tressa Torrance's outlook on life was a comfortable one, born of her own sunny nature.
Presently, without opening his eyes, he dropped the pipe on the table and nestled his head against the cushion. Tressa smiled, for she was happier than her father and Adrian would be up shortly. She heard the familiar whistle break out far down the sloping path beyond the grade. Higher and higher it mounted, and with hand held she listened with smiling eyes.
But as the boss lay motionless in the open, an evil smile came to the Pole's face. Closing his left eye, he took firm hold of the stock of his rifle and set his finger to the trigger. Something passed swiftly across the sights. He opened both eyes and raised his head. Tressa Torrance was climbing fearlessly out on the trestle supports to her father's assistance, calling for help. Koppy gasped.
Tressa herself settled the question: "I'm not going." "Send her out of the country for a few filthy bohunks!" sputtered her father. He spat into the sawdust box and crammed a charge of tobacco into his pipe with his uninjured hand, though the pain of holding the pipe in his left hand made him wince. "I won't recognise them by so much as a wink.
"And you paid her every cent without a word." "O' course! That hadn't anything to do with our little tiff. Didn't I owe the money? I got them horses cheap enough, goodness knows! I'd take a thousand of them any day in the week she trotted 'em along. Easiest way to make a fortune I know." Tressa eased herself away to look gravely in his face. "Did you ever think those horses might be stolen ones?"
"Thursday," he said, handing it to Conrad. Conrad nodded. "And in three weeks we'll be going home," murmured Tressa, "going home only three weeks!" A gentle birr, like the distant note of a toneless beetle, insinuated itself into their dreams. They had heard it for seconds without noticing, rising and falling on the night breeze.
"I don't believe you're as easy as you make out. The trees are thick ahead yet." "It's you, saying things like that, makes me moody," he returned sulkily. Tressa rose to find something in her room, and her father turned back to the out-of-doors with an impatient exclamation. In reality he was no more easy about things than Adrian.
Within the shack Tressa laid a sympathetic hand on his. "You'd better tell us about it, hadn't you? You're thinking a lot." He smiled sadly into her tender eyes. "There's not much to tell," he began, "at least, not in quantity. Blue Pete was the whitest man that ever lived, the whitest of any colour.
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