With a strange haunting of his appearance on the day she
first met him, she stole glances of half-frightened curiosity at
him while he was eating, and was relieved to find that he used his
knife and fork like the others, and that his appetite was far from
voracious. It was his employer who was the first to recall the
experiences of his past life, with a certain enthusiasm and the air
of a host anxious to contribute to the entertainment of his guests.
"You'd hardly believe, Miss Saltonstall, that that young gentleman
over there walked across the Continent--and two thousand odd miles,
wasn't it?--all alone, and with not much more in the way of traps
than he's got on now. Tell 'em, Harry, how the Apaches nearly
gobbled you up, and then let you go because they thought you as
good an Injun as any one of them, and how you lived a week in the
desert on two biscuits as big as that." A chorus of entreaty and
delighted anticipation followed the suggestion. The old expression
of being at bay returned for an instant to Guest's face, but,
lifting his eyes, he caught a look of almost sympathetic anxiety
from Maruja's, who had not spoken.
"It became necessary for me, some time ago," said Guest, half
explanatorily, to Maruja, "to be rather explicit in the details of
my journey here, and I told Mr. Prince some things which he seems
to think interesting to others. That is all. To save my life on
one occasion, I was obliged to show myself as good as an Indian, in
his own way, and I lived among them and traveled with them for two
weeks.
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