Starr, of the Desert

by B. M. Bower

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  STARR SEES TOO LITTLE OR TOO MUCH

  Carefully skirting the ridge where Helen May had her goats; keepingalways in the gulches and never once showing himself on high ground,Starr came after a while to a point where he could look up to thepinnacle behind Sunlight Basin, from the side opposite the point wherehe had wriggled away behind a bush. He left Rabbit hidden in abrush-choked arroyo that meandered away to the southwest, and begancautiously to climb.

  Starr did not expect to come upon his man on the peak; indeed he wouldhave been surprised to find the fellow still there. But that peak was asgood as any for reconnoitering the surrounding country, was higher thanany other within several miles, in fact. What he did hope was to pick upwith his glasses the man's line of retreat after a deed he must believesuccessfully accomplished. And there might be some betraying sign therethat would give him a clue.

  There was always the possibility, however, that the fellow had lingeredto see what took place after the supposed killing. He must believe thatthe girl who had been with Starr would take some action, and he mightwant to know to a certainty what that action was. So Starr wentcarefully, keeping behind boulders and rugged outcroppings and in thebottom of deep, water-worn washes when nothing else served. He did notthink the fellow, even if he stayed on the peak, would be watching behindhim, but Starr did not take any chances, and climbed rather slowly.

  He reached the summit at the left of where the man had stood when heshot; very close to the spot where Helen May had stood and looked uponVic and the goats and the country she abhorred. Starr saw her tracksthere in a sheltered place beside a rock and knew that she had been upthere, though in that dry soil he could not, of course, tell when. Whenthat baked soil takes an imprint, it is apt to hold it for a long whileunless rain or a real sand-storm blots it out.

  He hid there for a few minutes, craning as much as he dared to see ifthere were any sign of the man he wanted. In a little he left that spotand crept, foot by foot, over to the cairn, the "sheepherder's monument,"behind which the fellow had stood. There again he found the prints ofHelen May's small, mountain boots, prints which he had come to know verywell. And close to them, looking as though the two had stood together,were the larger, deeper tracks of a man.

  Starr dared not rise and stand upright. He must keep always under coverfrom any chance spying from below. He could not, therefore, trace thefootprints down the peak. But he got some idea of the man's directionwhen he left, and he knew, of course, where to find Helen May. He did notconnect the two in his mind, beyond registering clearly in his memory thetwo sets of tracks.

  He crept closer to the Basin side of the peak and looked down, followingan impulse he did not try to analyze. Certainly he did not expect to seeany one, unless it were Vic, so he had a little shock of surprise when hesaw Helen May riding the pinto up past the spring, with a man walkingbeside her and glancing up frequently into her face. Starr was human; Ihave reminded you several times how perfectly human he was. Heimmediately disliked that man. When he heard faintly the tones of HelenMay's laugh, he disliked the man more.

  He got down, with his head and his arms--the left one was lame inthe biceps--above a rock. He made sure that the sun had swung aroundso it would not shine on the lenses and betray him by anyheliographic reflection, and focussed his glasses upon the two. Hesaw as well as heard Helen May laugh, and he scowled over it. Butmostly he studied the man.

  "All right for you, old boy," he muttered. "I don't know who the devilyou are, but I don't like your looks." Which shows how human jealousywill prejudice a man.

  He saw Vic throwing rocks at something which he judged was a snake, andhe saw Helen May rein the pinto awkwardly around, "square herself foraction," as Starr would have styled it, and fire. By her elation;artfully suppressed, by the very carelessness with which she shoved thegun in its holster, he knew that she had hit whatever she shot at. Hecaught the tones of Holman Sommers' voice praising her, and he hated thetones. He watched them come on up to the little house, where theydisappeared at the end where the mesquite tree grew. Sitting in the shadethere, talking, he guessed they were doing, and for some reason heresented it. He saw Vic lift a rattlesnake up by its tail, and heard himyell that it had six rattles, and the button was missing.

  After that Starr turned his hack on the Basin and began to searchscowlingly the plain. He tried to pull his mind away from Helen May andher visitor and to fix it upon the would-be assassin. He believed thatthe horseman he had seen earlier in the day might be the one, and helooked for him painstakingly, picking out all the draws, all the drywashes and arroyos of that vicinity. The man would keep under cover, ofcourse, in making his getaway. He would not ride across a ridge if hecould help it, any more than would Starr.

  Even so, from that height Starr could look down into many of the deepplaces. In one of them he caught sight of a horseman picking his waycarefully along the boulder-strewn bottom. The man's back was toward him,but the general look of him was Mexican. The horse was bay with a rustyblack tail, but there were in New Mexico thousands of bay horses withblack tails, so there was nothing gained there. The rider seemed to bemaking toward Medina's ranch, though that was only a guess, since thearroyo he was following led in that direction at that particular place.Later it took a sharp turn to the south, and the rider went out of sightbefore Starr got so much as a glimpse at his features.

  He watched for a few minutes longer, sweeping his glasses slowly toright and left. He took another look down into the Basin and saw no onestirring, that being about the time when the plump sister was rollingup her fancy work and tapering off her conversation to the point ofmaking her adieu. Starr did not watch long enough for his own peace ofmind. Five more minutes would have brought the plump one into plainview with her brother and Helen May, and would have identified HolmanSommers as the escort of a lady caller. But those five minutes Starrspent in crawling back down the peak on the side farthest from theBasin, leaving Holman Sommers sticking in his mind with the unpleasantflavor of mystery.

  He mounted Rabbit again and made a detour of several miles so that hemight come up on the ridge behind Medina's without running any risk ofcrossing the trail of the men he wanted to watch. About two o'clock hestopped at a shallow, brackish stream and let Rabbit rest and feed for anhour while Starr himself climbed another rocky pinnacle and scanned thecountry between there and Medina's.

  The gate that let one off the main road and into the winding trail whichled to the house stood out in plain view at the mouth of a shallow draw.This was not the trail which led out from the home ranch toward SanBonito, where Starr had been going when he saw the track of themysterious automobile, but the trail one would take in going fromMedina's to Malpais. The ranch house itself stood back where the drawnarrowed, but the yellow-brown trail ribboned back from the gate inplain view.

  Here again Starr was fated to get a glimpse and no more. He focussed hisglasses on the main road first; picked up the Medina branch to the gate,followed the trail on up the draw, and again he picked up a man riding abay horse. And just as he was adjusting his lenses for a sharper clarityof vision, the horse trotted around a bend and disappeared from sight.

  Starr swore, but that did not bring the man back down the trail. Starrwas not at all sure that this was the same man he had seen in the draw,and he was not sure that either was the man who had shot at him. Butroosting on that heat-blistered pinnacle swearing about the things hedidn't know struck him as a profitless performance, so he climbed down,got into the saddle again, and rode on.

  He reached the granite ridge back of Medina's about four o'clock in theafternoon. He was tired, for he had been going since daylight, and for apart of the time at least he had been going on foot, climbing the steep,rocky sides of peaks for the sake of what he might see from the top, andthen climbing down again for sake of what some one else might see if hestayed too long. His high-heeled riding boots that Helen May so greatlyadmired were very good-looking and very comfortable when he had themstuck into
stirrups to the heel. But they had never been built forwalking. Therefore his feet ached abominably. And there was the heat, thesearing, dry heat of midsummer in the desert country. He was dog tired,and he was depressed because he had not seemed able to accomplishanything with all his riding and all his scanning of the country.

  He climbed slowly the last, brown granite ridge, the ridge behind EstanMedina's house. He would watch the place and see what was going on there.Then, he supposed he should go back and watch _Las Nuevas_, though hischief seemed to think that he had discovered enough there for theirpurposes. He had sent on the pamphlets, and he knew that when the timewas right, _Las Nuevas_ would be muzzled with a postal law and, hehazarded, a seizure of their mail.

  What he had to do now was to find the men who were working in conjunctionwith _Las Nuevas_; who were taking the active part in organizing and incontrolling the Mexican Alliance. So far he had not hit upon the realleaders, and he knew it, and in his weariness was oppressed with a senseof failure. They might better have left him in Texas, he told himselfglumly. They sure had drawn a blank when they drew him into the SecretService, because he had accomplished about as much as a pup trying to rundown a coyote.

  A lizard scuttled out of his way, when he crawled between two bouldersthat would shield him from sight unless a man walked right up on himwhere he lay--and Starr did not fear that, because there were too manyloose cobbles to roll and rattle; he knew, because he had been twice aslong as he liked in getting to this point quietly. He took off his hat,telling himself morosely that you couldn't tell his head from a lump ofgranite anyway, when he had his hat off, and lifted his glasses to hisaching eyes.

  The Medina ranch was just showing signs of awakening after a siesta.Estan himself was pottering about the corral, and Luis, a boy abouteighteen years old, was fooling with a colt in a small enclosure that hadevidently been intended for a garden and had been permitted to grow up inweeds and grass instead.

  After a while a peona came out and fed the chickens, and hunted throughthe sheds for eggs, which she carried in her apron. She stopped to watchLuis and the colt, and Luis coaxed her to give him an egg, which he wasfeeding to the colt when his mother saw and called to him shrilly fromthe house. The peona ducked guiltily and ran, stooping, beside a stonewall that hid her from sight until she had slipped into the kitchen. Thesenora searched for her, scolding volubly in high-keyed Mexican, so thatEstan came lounging up to see what was the matter.

  Afterwards they all went to the house, and Starr knew that there would bereal, Mexican tortillas crisp and hot from the baking, and chili concarne and beans, and perhaps another savory dish or two which the senoraherself had prepared for her sons.

  Starr was hungry. He imagined that he could smell those tortillas fromwhere he lay. He could have gone down, and the Medinas would have greetedhim with lavish welcome and would have urged him to eat his fill. Theywould not question him, he knew. If they suspected his mission, theywould cover their suspicion with much amiable talk, and theirprotestations of welcome would be the greater because of theirinsincerity. But he did not go down. He made himself more comfortablebetween the boulders and settled himself to wait and see what the nightwould bring.

  First it brought the gorgeous sunset, that made him think of Helen Mayjust because it was beautiful and because she would probably be gazing upat the crimson and gold and all the other elusive, swift-changing shadesthat go to make a barbaric sunset. Sure, she would be looking at it,unless she was still talking to that man, he thought jealously. Itfretted him that he did not know who the fellow was. So he turned histhoughts away from the two of them.

  Next came the dusk, and after that the stars. There was no moon to taunthim with memories, or more practically, to light for him the nearcountry. With the stars came voices from the porch of the adobe housebelow him. Estan's voice he made out easily, calling out to Luis inside,to ask if he had shut the colt in the corral. The senora's high voicespoke swiftly, admonishing Luis. And presently Luis could be seen dimlyas he moved down toward the corrals.

  Starr hated this spying upon a home, but he held himself doggedly to thetask. Too many homes were involved, too many sons were in danger, toomany mothers would mourn if he did not play the spy to some purpose now.This very home he was watching would be the happier when he and hisfellows had completed their work and the snake of intrigue was beheadedjust as Helen May had beheaded the rattler that afternoon. This home washappy now, under the very conditions that were being deplored sobombastically in the circulars he had read. Why, then, should its peacebe despoiled because of political agitators?

  Luis put the colt up for the night and returned, whistling, to the house.The tune he whistled was one he had learned at some movie show, and in aminute he broke into singing, "Hearts seem light, and life seems brightin dreamy Chinatown." Starr, brooding up there above the boy, wished thatLuis might never be heavier of heart than now, when he went singing upthe path to the thick-walled adobe. He liked Luis.

  The murmur of voices continued, and after awhile there came plaintivelyup to Starr the sound of a guitar, and mingling with it the voice of Luissinging a Spanish song. _La Golondrina_, it was, that melancholy song ofexile which Mexicans so love. Starr listened gloomily, following thewords easily enough in that still night air.

  Away to the northwest there gleamed a brighter, more intimate star thanthe constellation above. While Luis sang, the watcher in the rocks fixedhis eyes wistfully on that gleaming pin point of light, and wondered whatHelen May was doing. Her lighted window it was; her window that lookeddown through the mouth of the Basin and out over the broken mesa landthat was half desert. Until then he had not known that her window saw sofar; though it was not strange that he could see her light, since he wason the crest of a ridge higher than any other until one reached the bluffthat held Sunlight Basin like a pocket within its folds.

  Luis finished the song, strummed a while, sang a popular rag-time,strummed again and, so Starr explained his silence, went to bed. Estanbegan again to talk, now and then lifting his voice, speaking earnestly,as though he was arguing or protesting, or perhaps expounding a theory ofsome sort. Starr could not catch the words, though he knew in a generalway the meaning of the tones Estan was using.

  A new sound brought him to his knees, listening: the sound of ahigh-powered engine being thrown into low gear and buzzing like angryhornets because the wheels did not at once grip and thrust the carforward. Sand would do that. While Starr listened, he heard the chuckleof the car getting under way, and a subdued purring so faint that, hadthere not been a slow, quiet breeze from that direction, the sound wouldnever have reached his ears at all. Even so, he had no more thanidentified it when the silence flowed in and covered it as a lazy tidecovers a pebble in the moist sand.

  Starr glanced down at the house, heard Estan still talking, and gotcarefully to his feet. He thought he knew where the car had slipped inthe sand, and he made toward the place as quickly as he could go in thedark and still keep his movements quiet. It was back in that arroyo wherehe had first discovered traces of the car he now felt sure had come fromthe yard of _Las Nuevas_.

  He remembered that on the side next him the arroyo had deep-cut banksthat might get him a nasty fall if he attempted them in the dark, so hetook a little more time for the trip and kept to the rougher, yet safer,granite-covered ridge. Once, just once, he caught the glow of dimmedheadlights falling on the slope farthest from him. He hurried faster,after that, and so he climbed down into the arroyo at last, near thepoint where he had climbed out of it that other day.

  He went, as straight as he could go in the dark, to the place where hehad first seen the tracks of the Silvertown cords. He listened, straininghis ears to catch the smallest sound. A cricket fiddled stridently, butthere was nothing else.

  Starr took a chance and searched the ground with a pocket flashlight. Hedid not find any fresh tracks, however. And while he was standing in thedark considering how the hills might have carried the sound deceptivelyto his ear, and how h
e may have been mistaken, from somewhere on theother side of the ridge came the abrupt report of a gun. The sound wasmuffled by the distance, yet it was unmistakable. Starr listened, heardno second shot, and ran back up the rocky gulch that led to the ridge hehad just left, behind Medina's house.

  He was puffing when he reached the place where he had lain between thetwo boulders, and he stopped there to listen again. It came,--the soundhe instinctively expected, yet dreaded to hear; the sound of a woman'shigh-keyed wailing.