In his capacity of Indian agent Walter Lowell often had occasion to scan
the business deals of his more progressive wards. He was at once banker
and confidant of most of the Indians who were getting ahead in
agriculture and stock-raising. He did not seek such a position, nor did
he discourage it. Though it cost him much extra time and work, he
advised the Indians whenever requested.
One of the reservation's most prosperous stock-raisers, who had been
given permission to sell off some of his cattle, came to Lowell with a
thousand-dollar bill, asking if it were genuine.
"It's all right," said Lowell, "but where did you get it?"
The Indian said he had received it from Bill Talpers in the sale of some
livestock. Lowell handed it back without comment, but soon afterward
found occasion to call on Bill Talpers at the trader's store.
Bill had been a frequent and impartial visitor to the bottles that were
tucked away at both ends of his store. His hands and voice were shaky.
His hat was perched well forward on his head, covering a patch of
court-plaster which his clerk had put over a scalp wound, following a
painful process of hair-cutting. Bill had just been through the process
of "bouncing" Andy Wolters, who remained outside, expressing wonder and
indignation to all who called.
"All I did was ask Bill where his favorite gun was gone," quoth Andy in
his nasal voice, as Lowell drove up to the store platform. "I never seen
Bill without that gun before in my life. I jest started to kid him a
little by askin' him who took it away from him, when he fired up and
throwed me out of the store."
Lowell stepped inside the store.
"Bill," said Lowell, as the trader rose from his chair behind the screen
of letter-boxes, "I want you to help me out in an important matter."
Bill's surprise showed in his swollen face.
"It's this," went on Lowell. "If any of the Indians bring anything here
to pawn outside of the usual run of turquoise jewelry and spurs, I want
you to let me know. Also, if they offer any big bills in payment for
goods--say anything like a thousand-dollar bill--just give me the high
sign, will you? It may afford a clue in this murder case."
Talpers darted a look of suspicion at the agent. Lowell's face was
serene. He was leaning confidentially across the counter, and his eyes
met Bill's in a look that made the trader turn away.
"You know," said Lowell, "it's quite possible that money and valuables
were taken from Sargent's body. To be sure, they found his checkbook and
papers, but they wouldn't be of use to anyone else. A man of Sargent's
wealth must have had considerable ready cash with him, and yet none was
found. He would hardly be likely to start out on a long trip across
country without a watch, and yet nothing of the sort was discovered.
That's why I thought that if any Indians came in here with large amounts
of money, or if they tried to pawn valuables which might have belonged
to a man in Sargent's position, you could help clear up matters."
Hatred and suspicion were mingled in Talpers's look. The trader had
spent most of his hours, since his return from Morgan's ranch, cursing
the folly that had led him into wearing Sargent's watch. And now came
this young Indian agent, with talk about thousand-dollar bills. There
was another mistake Bill had made. He should have taken those bills far
away and had them exchanged for money of smaller denomination. But he
had been hard-pressed for cash, and suspicion seemed to point in such
convincing fashion toward Fire Bear and the other Indians that it did
not seem possible that it could be shifted elsewhere. Yet all his
confidence had been shaken when Helen Ervin had calmly and correctly
recounted to him the exact things that he had taken from that body on
the hill. Probably she had been talking to the agent and had told him
all she knew.
"I know what you're drivin' at," snarled Bill, his rage getting the
better of his judgment. "You've been talkin' to that girl at Morgan's
ranch, and she's been tellin' you all she thinks she knows. But she'd
better go slow with all her talk about valuables and thousand-dollar
bills. She forgets that she's as deep in this thing as anybody and I've
got the document to prove it."
The surprise in the Indian agent's face was too genuine to be mistaken.
Talpers realized that he had been betrayed into overshooting his mark.
The agent had been engaged in a little game of bluff, and Talpers had
fallen into his trap.
"All this is mighty interesting to me, Bill," said Lowell, regaining his
composure. "I just dropped in here, hoping for a little general
cooperation on your part, and here I find that you know a lot more than
anybody imagined."
"You ain't got anything on me," growled Bill, "and if you go spillin'
any remarks around here, it's your death-warrant sure."
Lowell did not take his elbow from the counter. His leaning position
brought out the breadth of his shoulders and emphasized the athletic
lines of his figure. He did not seem ruffled at Bill's open threat. He
regarded Talpers with a steady look which increased Bill's rage and
fear.
"The trouble with you is that you're so dead set on protectin' them
Injuns of yours," said the trader, "that you're around tryin' to throw
suspicion on innocent white folks. The hull county knows that Fire Bear
done that murder, and if you hadn't got him on to the reservation the
jail'd been busted into and he'd been lynched as he ought to have been."
Bill waited for an answer, but none came. The young agent's steady,
thoughtful scrutiny was not broken.
"You've coddled them Injuns ever sence you've been on the job," went on
Bill, casting aside discretion, "and now you're encouragin' them in
downright murder. Here this young cuss, Fire Bear, is traipsin' around
as he pleases, on nothin' more than his word that he'll appear for
trial. But when Jim McFann busts out of jail, you rush out the hull
Injun police force to run him down. And now here you are around, off the
reservation, tryin' to saddle suspicion on your betters. It ain't right,
I claim. Self-respectin' white men ought to have more protection around
here."
Talpers's voice had taken on something of a whine, and Lowell
straightened up in disgust.
"Bill," he said, "you aren't as much of a man as I gave you credit for
being, and what's more you've been in some crooked game, just as sure as
thousand-dollar bills have four figures on them."
Paying no attention to the imprecations which Talpers hurled after him,
the agent went back to his automobile and turned toward the agency. He
had intended going on to the Greek Letter Ranch, but Talpers's words had
caused him to make a change in his plans. At the agency he brought out a
saddle horse, and, following a trail across the undulating hills on the
reservation, reached the wagon-road below the ranch, without arousing
Talpers's suspicion.
As he tied his pony at the gate, Lowell noticed further improvement in
the general appearance of the ranch.
"Somebody more than Wong has been doing this heavy work," he said to
Helen, who had come out to greet him. "It must be that Morgan--your
stepfather is well enough to help. Anyway, the ranch looks better every
time I come."
"Yes, he is helping some," said Helen uneasily. "But I'm getting to be a
first-rate ranch-woman. I had no idea it was so much fun running a place
like this."
"I came over to see if you couldn't take time enough off for a little
horseback ride," said Lowell. "This is a country for the saddle, after
all. I still get more enjoyment from a good horseback ride than from a
dozen automobile trips. I'll saddle up the old white horse while you get
ready."
Helen ran indoors, and Lowell went to the barn and proceeded to saddle
the white horse that bore the Greek Letter brand. The smiling Wong came
out to cast an approving eye over the work.
"This old fly-fighter's a pretty good horse for one of his age, isn't
he, Wong?" said Lowell, giving a last shake to the saddle, after the
cinch had been tightened.
In shattered English Wong went into ecstasies over the white horse. Then
he said, suddenly and mysteriously:
"You know Talpels?"
"You mean Bill Talpers?" asked Lowell. "What about him?"
Once more the dominant tongue of the Occident staggered beneath Wong's
assault, as the cook described, partly in pantomime, the manner of Bill
Talpers's downfall the night before.
"Do you mean to say that Talpers was over here last night and that here
is where he got that scalp-wound?" demanded Lowell.
Wong grinned assent, and then vanished, after making a sign calling for
secrecy on Lowell's part, as Helen arrived, ready for the ride.
Lowell was a good horseman, and the saddle had become Helen's chief
means of recreation. In fact riding seemed to bring to her the only
contentment she had known since she had come to the Greek Letter Ranch.
She had overcome her first fear of the Indians. All her rides that were
taken alone were toward the reservation, as she had studiously avoided
going near Talpers's place. Also she did not like to ride past the hill
on the Dollar Sign road, with its hints of unsolved mystery. But she had
quickly grown to love the broad, free Indian reservation, with its
limitless miles of unfenced hills. She liked to turn off the road and
gallop across the trackless ways, sometimes frightening rabbits and
coyotes from the sagebrush. Several times she had startled antelope, and
once her horse had shied at a rattlesnake coiled in the sunshine. The
Indians she had learned to look upon as children. She had visited the
cabins and lodges of some of those who lived near the ranch, and was not
long in winning the esteem of the women who were finding the middle
ground, between the simplicity of savage life and the complexities of
civilization, something too much for mastery.
Lowell and Helen galloped in silence for miles along the road they had
followed in the automobile not many days before. At the crest of a high
ridge, Helen turned at right angles, and Lowell followed.
"There's a view over here I had appropriated for myself, but I'm willing
to share it with you, seeing that this is your own particular
reservation and you ought to know about everything it contains," said
Helen.
The ridge dipped and then rose again, higher than before. The plains
fell away on both sides--infinite miles of undulations. Straight ahead
loomed the high blue wall of the mountains. They walked their horses,
and finally stopped them altogether. The chattering of a few prairie
dogs only served to intensify the great, mysterious silence.
"Sometimes the stillness seems to roll in on you here like a tide," said
Helen. "I can positively feel it coming up these great slopes and
blanketing everything. It seems to me that this ridge must have been
used by Indian watchers in years gone by. I can imagine a scout standing
here sending up smoke signals. And those little white puffs of clouds up
there are the signals he sent into the sky."
"I think you belong in this country," Lowell answered smilingly.
"I'm sure I do. You remember when I first saw these plains and hills I
told you the bigness frightened me a little when the sun brought it all
out in detail. Well, it doesn't any more. Just to be unfettered in mind,
and to live and breathe as part of all this vastness, would be ideal."
"That's where you're in danger of going to the other extreme," the agent
replied. "You'll remember that I told you human companionship is as
necessary as bacon and flour and salt in this country. You're more
dependent on the people about you here, even if your nearest neighbor is
five or ten miles away, than you would be in any apartment building in a
big city. You might live and die there, and no one would be the wiser.
Also you might get along tolerably well, while living alone. But you
can't do it out here and keep a normal mental grip on life."
"My, what a lecture!" laughed the girl, though there was no merriment in
her voice. "But it hardly applies to me, for the reason that I always
depend upon my neighbors in the ordinary affairs of life. I'm sure I
love to be sociable to my Indian neighbors, and even to their agent.
Haven't I ridden away out here just to be sociable to you?"
"No dodging! I promised I wouldn't say anything more about the matters
that have been disturbing you so, but that promise was contingent on
your playing fair with me. I understand Bill Talpers has been causing
you some annoyance, and you haven't said a word to me about it."
Helen flashed a startled glance at Lowell. He was impassive as her
questioning eyes searched his face. Amazement and concern alternated in
her features. Then she took refuge in a blaze of anger.
"I don't know how you found out about Talpers!" she cried. "It is true
that he did cause a--a little annoyance, but that is all gone and
forgotten. But I am not going to forget your impertinence quite so
easily."
"My what?"
"Your impertinence?"
The girl was trembling with anger, or apprehension, and tapped her boot
nervously with her quirt as she spoke.
"You've been lecturing me about various things," she went on, "and now
you bring up Talpers as a sort of bugaboo to frighten me."
"You don't know Bill Talpers. If he has any sort of hold on you or on
Willis Morgan, he'll try to break you both. He is as innocent of
scruples as a lobo wolf."
"What hold could he possibly have on me--on us?"
She looked at Lowell defiantly as she asked the question, but he thought
he detected a note of concern in her voice.
"I didn't say he had any hold. I merely pointed out that if he were
given any opportunity he'd make life miserable for both of you."
Lowell did not add that Talpers, in a fit of rage and suspicion,
augmented by strong drink, had hinted that Helen knew something of the
murder. He had been inclined to believe that Talpers had merely been
"fighting wild" when he made the veiled accusation--that the trader,
being very evidently only partly recovered from a bout with his pet
bottles, had made the first counter-assertion that had come into his
head in the hope of provoking Lowell into a quarrel. But there was a
quality of terror in the girl's voice which struck Lowell with chilling
force. Something in his look must have caught Helen's attention, for her
nervousness increased.
"You have no right to pillory me so," she said rapidly. "You have been
perfectly impossible right along--that is, ever since this crime
happened. You've been spying here and there--"
"Spying!"
"Yes, downright spying! You've been putting suspicion where it doesn't
belong. Why, everybody believes the Indians did it--everybody but you.
Probably some Indians did it who never have been suspected and never
will be--not the Indians who are under suspicion now."
"That's just about what another party was telling me not long ago--that
I was coddling the Indians and trying to fasten suspicion where it
didn't rightfully belong."
"Who else told you that?"
"No less a person than Bill Talpers."
"There you go again, bringing in that cave man. Why do you keep talking
to me about Talpers? I'm not afraid of him."
Most girls would have been on the verge of hysteria, Lowell thought,
but, while Helen was plainly under a nervous strain, her self-command
returned. The agent was in possession of some information--how much she
did not know. Perhaps she could goad him into betraying the source of
his knowledge.
"I know you're not afraid of Talpers," remarked Lowell, after a pause,
"but at least give me the privilege of being afraid for you. I know Bill
Talpers better than you do."
"What right have you to be afraid for me? I'm of age, and besides, I
have a protector--a guardian--at the ranch."
Lowell was on the point of making some bitter reply about the
undesirability of any guardianship assumed by Willis Morgan, squaw man,
recluse, and recipient of common hatred and contempt. But he kept his
counsel, and remarked, pleasantly:
"My rights are merely those of a neighbor--the right of one neighbor to
help another."
"There are no rights of that sort where the other neighbor isn't asking
any help and doesn't desire it."
"I'm not sure about your not needing it. Anyway, if you don't now, you
may later."
The girl did not answer. The horses were standing close together, heads
drooping lazily. Warm breezes came fitfully from the winds' playground
below. The handkerchief at the girl's neck fluttered, and a strand of
her hair danced and glistened in the sunshine. The graceful lines of her
figure were brought out by her riding-suit. Lowell put his palm over the
gloved hand on her saddle pommel. Even so slight a touch thrilled him.
"If a neighbor has no right to give advice," said Lowell, "let us assume
that my unwelcome offerings have come from a man who is deeply in love
with you. It's no great secret, anyway, as it seems to me that even the
meadow-larks have been singing about it ever since we started on this
ride."
The girl buried her face in her hands. Lowell put his arm about her
waist, and she drooped toward him, but recovered herself with an effort.
Putting his arm away, she said:
"You make matters harder and harder for me. Please forget what I have
said and what you have said, and don't come to see me any more."
She spoke with a quiet intensity that amazed Lowell.
"Not come to see you any more! Why such an extreme sentence?"
"Because there is an evil spell on the Greek Letter Ranch. Everybody who
comes there is certain to be followed by trouble--deep trouble."
The girl's agitation increased. There was terror in her face.
"Look here!" began Lowell. "This thing is beyond all promises of
silence. I--"
"Don't ask what I mean!" said the girl. "You might find it awkward. You
say you are in love with me?"
"I repeat it a thousand times."
"Well, you are the kind of man who will choose honor every time. I
realize that much. Suppose you found that your love for me was bringing
you in direct conflict with your duty?"
"I know that such a thing is impossible," broke in Lowell.
Helen smiled, bitterly.
"It is so far from being impossible that I am asking you to forget what
you have said, and to forget me as well. There is so much of evil on the
Greek Letter Ranch that the very soil there is steeped in it. I am going
away, but I know its spell will follow me."
"You are going?" queried Lowell. "When?"
"When these men now charged with the murder are acquitted. They will be
acquitted, will they not?"
The eager note in her question caught Lowell by surprise.
"No man can tell," he replied. "It's all as inscrutable as that mountain
wall over there."
Helen shaded her eyes with her gauntleted hand as she looked in the
direction indicated by Lowell. Black clouds were pouring in masses over
the mountain-range. The sunshine was being blotted out, as if by some
giant hand. The storm-clouds swept toward them as they turned the horses
and started back along the ridge. A huge shadow, which Helen
shudderingly likened to the sprawling figure of Talpers in the
lamplight, raced toward them over the plains.
"There isn't a storm in all that blackness," Lowell assured her. "It's
all shadow and no substance. Perhaps your fears will turn out that way."
The girl regarded him gravely.
"I've tried to hope as much, but it's no use, especially when you've
felt the first actual buffetings of the storm."
The approaching cloud shadow seemed startlingly solid. The girl urged
her horse into a gallop, and Lowell rode silently at her side. The
shadow overtook them. Angry winds seemed to clutch at them from various
angles, but no rain came from the cloud mass overhead. When they rode
into the ranch yard, the sun was shining again. They dismounted near the
barn, and Wong took the white horse. Lowell and the girl walked through
the yard to the front gate, the agent leading his horse. As they passed
near the porch there came through the open door that same chilling,
sarcastic voice which stirred all the ire in Lowell's nature.
"Helen," the voice said, "that careless individual, Wong, must be
reprimanded. He has mislaid one of my choicest volumes. Perhaps it would
be better for you to attend to replacing the books on the shelves after
this."
Every word was intended to humiliate, yet the voice was moderately
pitched. There was even a slight drawl to it.
Lowell's face betrayed his anger as he glanced at the girl. He made a
gesture of impatience, but Helen motioned to him, in warning.
"Some day you're going to let me take you away from this," he said
grimly, looking at her with an intensity of devotion which brought the
red to her cheeks. "Meantime, thanks for taking me out on that magic
ridge. I'll never forget it."
"It will be better for you to forget everything," answered the girl.
Lowell was about to make a reply, when the voice came once more, cutting
like a whiplash in a renewal of the complaint concerning the lost book.
The girl turned, with a good-bye gesture, and ran indoors. Lowell led
his horse outside the yard and rode toward Talpers's place, determined
to have a few definite words with the trader.
When Lowell reached Talpers's, the usual knot of Indians was gathered on
the front porch, with the customary collection of cowpunchers and
ranchmen discussing matters inside the store.
"Bill ain't been here all the afternoon," said Talpers's clerk in answer
to Lowell's question. "He sat around here for a while after you left
this morning, and then he saddled up and took a pack-horse and hit off
toward the reservation, but I don't know where he went or when he'll be
back."
Lowell rode thoughtfully to the agency, trying in vain to bridge the gap
between Talpers's cryptic utterances bearing on the murder, and the not
less cryptic statements of Helen in the afternoon--an occupation which
kept him unprofitably employed until far into the night.