ugh 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 th