d threw his camping equipment inside the shack.
Then he turned his pack-animal into the wild hay in the pasture he had
fenced off in the creek bottom. He had some other live stock roaming
around in the little valley--enough steers and horses to make a
beginning toward a comfortable independence, if he had only had sense
enough to start in that way. Also there was good soil on the upland. He
could run a ditch from the creek to the nearest mesa, where the land was
red and sandy and would raise anything. The reservation agriculturist
had been along and had shown him just how the trick could be done, but
Bill Talpers's bootlegging schemes looked a lot better then!

The half-breed slammed his shack door shut and rode away with his greasy
hat-brim pulled well over his eyes. He paid little attention to the
demands he was making on horseflesh, and he rode openly across the
country. If the Indian police saw him, he could outdistance them. The
thing that he had set out to do could be done quickly. After that,
nothing mattered much.

Skirting the ridge on which Helen and Lowell had stood, Jim made a
detour as he approached the reservation line and avoided the Greek
Letter Ranch. He swung into the road well above the ranch, and,
breasting the hill where the murder had taken place on the Dollar Sign,
he galloped down the slope toward Talpers's store.

The trader was alone in his store when the half-breed entered. Talpers
had seen McFann coming, some distance down the road. Something in the
half-breed's bearing in the saddle, or perhaps it was some inner stir of
guilty fear, made Talpers half-draw his revolver. Then he thrust it back
into its holster, and, swinging around in his chair, awaited his
partner's arrival. He even attempted a jaunty greeting.

"Hello, Jim," he called, as the half-breed's lithe figure swung in
through the outer doorway; "ain't you even a little afraid of the Injun
police?"

McFann did not answer, but flung open the door into Bill's sanctum. It
was no unusual thing for the men to confer there, and two or three
Indians on the front porch did not even turn their heads to see what was
going on inside. Talpers's clerk was out and Andy Wolters had just
departed, after reporting to the trader that the half-breed had seemed
"plumb uneasy out there in the brush." Andy had not told Bill the cause
of McFann's uneasiness, but on that point the trader was soon to be
enlightened.

"Bill," said the half-breed purrin