Both men stared at her with unaffected concern.

“What do you know about any mysterious stranger?” demanded her father.

“Do you suppose you men kin keep a secret,” scoffed Polly.  “Why, Dick Ruggles told me how skeert ye all were over an entire stranger, and he advised me not to wander down the road after dark.  I asked him if he thought I was a pickaninny to be frightened by bogies, and that if he hadn’t a better excuse for wantin’ ‘to see me home’ from the Injin spring, he might slide.”

Larry laughed again, albeit a little bitterly, for it seemed to him that the excuse was fully justified; but the colonel said promptly, “Dick’s a fool, and you might have told him there were worse things to be met on the road than bogies.  Run away now, and see that the niggers are on hand when the stage comes.”

Two hours later the stage came with a clatter of hoofs and a cloud of red dust, which precipitated itself and a dozen thirsty travelers upon the veranda before the hotel bar-room; it brought also the usual “express” newspapers and much talk to Colonel Swinger, who always received his guests in a lofty personal fashion at the door, as he might have done in his old Virginian home; but it brought likewise—­marvelous to relate—­an actual guest, who had two trunks and asked for a room!  He was evidently a stranger to the ways of Buena Vista, and particularly to those of Colonel Swinger, and at first seemed inclined to resent the social attitude of his host, and his frank and free curiosity.  When he, however, found that Colonel Swinger was even better satisfied to give an account of his own affairs, his family, pedigree, and his present residence, he began to betray some interest.  The colonel told him all the news, and would no doubt have even expatiated on his ghostly visitant, had he not prudently concluded that his guest might decline to remain in a haunted inn.  The stranger had spoken of staying a week; he had some private mining speculations to watch at Wynyard’s Gulch,—­the next settlement, but he did not care to appear openly at the “Gulch Hotel.”  He was a man of thirty, with soft, pleasing features and a singular litheness of movement, which, combined with a nut-brown, gypsy complexion, at first suggested a foreigner.  But his dialect, to the colonel’s ears, was distinctly that of New England, and to this was added a puritanical and sanctimonious drawl.  “He looked,” said the colonel in after years, “like a blank light mulatter, but talked like a blank Yankee parson.”  For all that, he was acceptable to his host, who may have felt that his reminiscences of his plantation on the James River were palling on Buena Vista ears, and was glad of his new auditor.  It was an advertisement, too, of the hotel, and a promise of its future fortunes.  “Gentlemen having propahty interests at the Gulch, sah, prefer to stay at Buena Vista with another man of propahty, than to trust to those new-fangled papah-collared,