e
back."

Murray handed him one, and Steve sat down. He had been fond of books
in the days before he was captured by the Lipans. He had not forgotten
his reading at all, and it came back to him in a way that made his
heart jump. But that was after he had made a great effort, and driven
away the faces of Rita and Ni-ha-be.

Both of them would somehow come between his eyes and the paper of those
printed pages at first. Both of them were such nice, pretty,
well-behaved girls, and yet one of them was white, the daughter of his
friend Murray, and the other was only a poor little squaw of the
Apaches.

How the black eyes of Ni-ha-be would have snapped if she could have
read the thoughts of Knotted Cord at that moment! She would never
again have regarded him as a handsome young brave, almost good enough
to be an Apache.

Murray, too, picked up a magazine and sat down.

"It will do for a sort of medicine," he muttered. "I may learn
something from it, too. The world has changed a great deal since I
have had newspapers or magazines to read. There may be some new
nations in it, for all I know, and there surely must be a new lot of
kings and queens and presidents, and all that sort of thing."

It was that thought which made him turn over a little carelessly all
the illustrated articles and the stories, till he came to the "news of
the month" among the leaves at the end.

There he began actually to read, and read closely, for it was all very
new to him, although it was several months since it had been printed
there.

There was a great deal of it, for the editor had condensed everything
into the fewest words possible, and more than once Murray's eyes opened
wider or his mouth puckered up as if for a whistle. The world had been
moving fast while he had been among the Lipans.

"And Rita," he muttered, "she knows nothing at all about any of it. I
don't know that I am sorry. She will have all the pleasure of learning
all she needs to know, and she won't have anything to unlearn. I wish
I could forget some things as completely as she seems to have done. I
hope a good many of them will never come back to her at all."

No doubt it was very interesting, and Steve looked up from his own
reading to see how completely absorbed Murray had become.

Still, it must have been a remarkable news item that could make a man
of steady nerves bound suddenly to his feet and hold that magazine out
at arm's length.

"Why, Murray