Page:Son of the wind.djvu/44

 chief points of his confoundment. "Who told you that? Who do you mean by they?"

"Then you do know about it?" Carron said quietly.

The scholar seemed not to have heard.

"People in different parts of the valley have directed you to me, on this errand?" he persisted.

"Why, that's a strange thing!"

Looking into his candid and bewildered eyes, Carron knew he was going to be frank with Rader at the expense of the man on the road. "For a fact, Mr. Rader," he confessed, "it was one person who directed me here, only one; and he didn't want to. I had to work to get it out of him."

Rader's expression came around slowly from flat incredulity to a fresh query. "Well, why shouldn't he direct you?"

"That was what I thought," said Carron, as puzzled now by Rader as Rader was by the man on the road, "but I supposed it was because you had asked him not to."

"I?" Rader repeated. He seemed to have the greatest difficulty in connecting himself with the matter at all. "Why the deuce should I ask him not to?"

Carron stared. "If you haven't, some one has." The scholar silently confronted this cryptic re-