conscious that she was watching him narrowly.

"I mean that I don't believe Bill Talpers had anything to do with
murdering that man on the Dollar Sign road!"

CHAPTER XV

"There's one thing sure in all cases of crime: If people would only
depend more on Nature and less on themselves, they'd get results
sooner."

Lowell and his chief clerk were finishing one of their regular evening
discussions of the crime which most people were forgetting, but which
still occupied the Indian agent's mind to the complete exclusion of all
reservation business.

"What do you mean?" asked Rogers, from behind smoke clouds.

"Just the fact that, if we can only find it, Nature has tagged every
crime in a way that makes it possible to get an answer."

"But there are lots of crimes in which no manifestation of Nature is
possible."

"Not a one. What are finger-prints but manifestations of Nature? And yet
for ages we couldn't see the sign that Nature hung out for us. No doubt
we're just as obtuse about a lot of things that will be just as simple
and just as plain when their meaning is finally driven home."

"But Nature hasn't given a hint about that Dollar Sign road crime. Yet
it took place outdoors, right in Nature's haunts."

"You simply mean that we haven't been able to comprehend Nature's
signals."

"But you've been over the ground a dozen times, haven't you?"

"Fifty times--but all that merely proves what I contend. If I go over
that ground one hundred times, and don't find anything, what does it
prove? Merely that I am ninety-nine times stupider than I should be. I
should get the answer the first time over."

Rogers laughed.

"I prefer the most comfortable theory. I've settled down in the popular
belief that Bill Talpers did the killing. Think how easy that makes it
for me--and the chances are that I'm right at that."

"You are hopeless, Ed! But remember, if this thing goes unsolved it will
only be because we haven't progressed beyond the first-reader stage in
interpreting what Mother Nature has to teach us."

For several days following the acquittal of Fire Bear and McFann, Lowell
had worked almost unceasingly in the hope of getting new evidence in the
case which nearly everybody else seemed willing to forget. A similar
persistency had marked Lowell's career as a newspaper reporter. He had
turned up several sensations when rival newspaper men had abandoned
certain cases as hopeless so far as new thrills were co