"Please don't get our talk back where it was before," pleaded Helen, as they stepped out on the porch and Lowell said good-bye. "I've enjoyed the ride and the talk to-day because it all took me away from myself and from this place of horrors. But I can't leave here permanently, no matter how much I might desire it." "It's all going to be just as you say," Lowell replied. "Some day I'll see through it all, perhaps, but right now I'm not trying very hard, because some way I feel that you don't want me to." She shook hands with him gratefully, and Lowell drove slowly back to the agency, not forgetting his customary stop at the scene of the murder--a stop that proved fruitless as usual. When he entered the agency office, Lowell was greeted with an excited hail from Ed Rogers. "Here's news!" exclaimed the chief clerk. "Tom Redmond has telephoned over that Jim McFann has broken jail." "How did he get away?" "Jim had been hearing all this talk about lynching. It had been coming to him, bit by bit, in the jail, probably passed on by the other prisoners, and it got him all worked up. It seems that the jailer's kid, a boy about sixteen years old, had been in the habit of bringing Jim's meals. Also the kid had a habit of carrying Dad's keys around, just to show off. Instead of grabbing his soup, Jim grabbed the kid by the throat. Then he made the boy unlock the cell door and Jim slipped out, gagged the kid, and walked out of the jail. He jumped on a cowboy's pony in front of the jail, and was gone half an hour before the kid, who had been locked in Jim's cell, managed to attract attention. Tom Redmond wants you to get out the Indian police, because he's satisfied Jim has skipped to the reservation and is hiding somewhere in the hills." CHAPTER VIII "That there girl down at the Greek Letter Ranch is the best-lookin' girl in these parts. I was goin' to slick up and drop around to see her, but this here Injun agent got in ahead of me. A man with nothin' but a cowpony don't stand a show against a feller with an auto when it comes to callin' on girls these days." The nasal, drawling voice of Andy Wolters, cowpuncher for one of the big leasing outfits on the Indian reservation, came to the ears of Bill Talpers as the trader sat behind his post-office box screen, scowling out upon a sunshiny world. A chorus of laughter from other cowpunchers greeted the frank declaration of Mr. Wolters. "Agent or no agent, you wouldn't stand a show with that girl," chimed in one of the punchers. "The squaw professor'd run you through the barb-wire fence so fast that you'd leave hide and clothes stickin' to it. Willis Morgan ain't ever had a visitor on his place sence he run the Greek Letter brand on his first steer." "Well, he ain't got any more steers left. That old white horse is all the stock I see of his--anyways, it's all that's carryin' that pitchfork brand."