s broad
chest.

McFann looked contemptuously at the great figure, helpless in death.
Then he lighted a cigarette, and, laughing at the terror of the Indians,
who had been peeping in the window at the last of the tragedy, the
half-breed walked out of the store, and, mounting his horse, rode to the
agency and gave himself up to Lowell.

CHAPTER XIV

Lowell consulted with Judge Garford and Sheriff Tom Redmond, and it was
decided to keep Jim McFann in jail at the agency until time for his
trial for complicity in the first murder on the Dollar Sign road.

Sheriff Redmond admitted that, owing to the uncertainty of public
sentiment, he could not guarantee the half-breed's safety if McFann were
lodged in the county jail. Consequently the slayer of Bill Talpers
remained in jail at the agency, under a strong guard of Indian police,
supplemented by trustworthy deputies sent over by Redmond.

The killing of Talpers was the excuse for another series of attacks on
Lowell by the White Lodge paper. Said the editor:

The murder of our esteemed neighbor, William Talpers, by James
McFann, a half-breed, is another evidence of the necessity of
opening the reservation to white settlement.

This second murder on the Dollar Sign road is not a mystery. Its
perpetrator was seen at this bloody work. Furthermore, he is
understood to have coolly confessed his crime. But, like the first
murder, which is still shrouded in mystery, this was a crime which
found its inception on the Indian reservation. Are white residents
adjacent to the reservation to have their lives snuffed out at the
pleasure of Government wards and reservation offscourings in
general? Has not the time come when the broad acres of the Indian
reservation, which the redskins are doing little with, should be
thrown open to the plough of the white man?

"'Plough of the white man' is good," cynically observed Ed Rogers, after
calling Lowell's attention to the article. "If those cattlemen ever get
the reservation opened, they'll keep the nesters out for the next forty
years, if they have to kill a homesteader for every hundred and sixty
acres. So far as Bill Talpers's killing is concerned, I can't see but
what it is looked upon as a good thing for the peace of the community."

It seemed to be a fact that Jim McFann's act had appealed irresistibly
to a large element. Youthful cowpunchers rode for miles and w