sat at the back of the room near the inner door, massive and motionless in the half-light from the inner window; a man with a negro face and enormous shoulders. This was what the humorous self-criticism of America playfully calls the Bad Man; whom his friends might call a bodyguard and his enemies a bravo.
This man never moved or stirred to greet anybody; but the sight of him in the outer room seemed to move Peter Wain to his first nervous query.
"Is anybody with the chief?" he asked.
"Don't get rattled, Peter," chuckled his uncle. "Wilton the secretary is with him, and I hope that's enough for anybody. I don't believe Wilton ever sleeps for watching Merton. He is better than twenty bodyguards. And he's quick and quiet as an Indian."
"Well, you ought to know," said his nephew, laughing. "I remember the Red Indian tricks you used to teach me when I was a boy and liked to read Red Indian stories. But in my Red Indian stories Red Indians seemed always to have the worst of it."
"They didn't in real life," said the old frontiersman grimly.
"Indeed?" inquired the bland Mr. Blake. "I should have thought they could do very little against our firearms."
"I've seen an Indian stand under a hundred guns with nothing but a little scalping knife and kill a
41
