"If I'm afraid, it isn't for myself," she said, with that old, unchildlike look he had not seen in her eyes of late. "But I'll tell you what I'm afraid of. Have you ever heard of people who were 'hoodoos'? I guess you have. Well, sometimes I'm afraid I'm just that--like the snakes in that ring. I'm afraid I bring bad luck to people--people I like. It isn't the harm to me that ever frightens me. I guess I can fight that; but no one can fight a 'hoodoo,' I guess; and your arm--" "Oh, see here! Wake up, 'Tana, you're dreaming! Who put that cussed nonsense into your head? 'Hoodoo!' Pshaw! I will have patience with you in anything but that. Did any one look at you last night as if you were a 'hoodoo'? Here comes Max; we'll ask him." But she did not smile at their badinage. "I was in earnest, and you think it only funny," she said. "Well, maybe you won't always laugh at it. Men who know a heap believe in 'hoodoos.'" "But not 'hoodoos' possessed of the _tout ensemble_ of Miss Rivers," objected Lyster. "You are simply trying to scare us--me, out of the journey I hoped to make with you to Helena. You are trying to evade a year of scholastic training we have planned for you, and you would like to prophesy that the boat will blow up or the cars run off the track if you embark. But it won't. You will say good-by to your ogre of a guardian to-morrow. You will be guarded by no less a personage than my immaculate self to the door of your academy; from which you will emerge, later on, with never a memory of 'hoodoos' in your wise brain; and you will live to a green old age and make clay busts of us both when we are gray haired. There! I think I'm a good healthy sort of a prophet; and as a reward will you go with me to-morrow?" "With you? Then it is you who--" "Who has planned the whole brilliant scheme? Exactly--the journey part of it at all events; and I'm not so modest as our friend here. I'll take the blame of my share, and his, too, if he doesn't speak up for himself. Here comes your new friend, Dan. Where did you pick him up?" It was the man Harris, and beside him was the captain. They were talking with some animation of late Indian raids to the westward. "I doubt if it was Indians at all who did the thieving," remarked Harris; "there are always a lot of scrub whites ready to take advantage of war signals, and do devilment of that sort, made up as reds." "Oh, yes--some say so! That man Holly used to get the credit of that sort of renegade work. Handsome Holly he was called once. But now that he's dead, maybe we'll see he was not the only one to work mischief between the whites and reds." "Holly? Lee Holly?" asked Lyster. "Why, didn't we hear a rumor that he wasn't dead at all, but had been seen somewhere near Butte?"