Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/102

86 father. Besides, what the man had said made it certain that he did not think the specter was "Ben"; for the specter had "got Ben." Did Alan look like some one else, then? Like whom? Evidently like the man—now dead for he had a ghost—who had "got" Ben, in the big man's opinion. Who could that be?

No answer, as yet, was possible to that. But if he did look like some one, then that some one was—or had been—dreaded not only by the big man who had entered the house, but by Benjamin Corvet as well. "You got Ben!" the man had cried out. Got him? How? "But you can't get me!" he had said. "You—with the bullet hole above your eye!" What did that mean?

Alan got up and went to look at himself in the mirror he had seen in the hall. He was white, now that the flush of the fighting was going; he probably had been pale before with excitement, and over his right eye there was a round, black mark. Alan looked down at his hands; a little skin was off one knuckle, where he had struck the man, and his fingers were smudged with a black and sooty dust. He had smudged them on the papers up-stairs or else in feeling his way about the dark house, and at some time he had touched his forehead and left the black mark. That had been the "bullet hole."

The rest that the man had said had been a reference to some name; Alan had no trouble to recollect the name and, while he did not understand it at all, it stirred him queerly—"the Miwaka." What was that? The queer excitement and questioning that the name brought, when he repeated it to himself, was not recollection; for he could not recall ever having heard