So the news had run ahead of him. Bob began to think the news important,
but for some reason at which he could not as yet guess. This conviction
was strengthened by the fact that from the two mountain cabins he passed
on his way to the beginning of the trail, men lounged out to talk with
him, and in each case the question, craftily rendered casual, was put to
him as to his business in the Basin. Before one of these cabins stood a
sweating horse.
"Look here," he demanded of the Carrolls, "why all this interest about
our being in the Basin? Every man-jack asks me. What's the point?"
Old man Carroll stroked his long beard.
"Do they so?" he drawled comfortably. "Well, I reckon little things make
news, as they say, when you're in a wild country. They ain't been no
work done in the Basin for so long that we're all just nat'rally
interested; that's all."
He looked Bob tranquilly in the eye with the limpid gaze of innocence
before which Bob's scrutiny fell abashed. For a while his suspicions of
anything unusual were almost lulled; the countryside _was_ proverbially
curious of anything out of the course of events.
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