Starr-of the Desert

by Bower, B M

  But he did nothing of the kind, and for what he considered a very good reason. The wind was blowing in eddying gusts, of the kind that seizes and whirls things; such a gust swooped into the room when he opened the door, seized upon some papers which lay on her writing desk, and sent them clear across the room.

  Starr hastily closed the door and rescued the papers where they had flattened against the wall; and he wished he had gone blind before he saw what they were. A glance was all he gave, at first—the involuntary glance which one gives to a bit of writing picked up in an odd place—but that was enough to chill his blood with the shock of damning enlightenment. A page of writing, it was, fine, symmetrical, hard to decipher—a page of Holly Sommers' manuscript; you know that, of course.

  But Starr did not know. He only knew the writing matched the pages of revolutionary stuff he had found in the office of Las Nuevas. There was no need of comparing the two; the writing was unmistakable. And he believed that Helen May was the writer. He believed it when he glanced up and saw her coming in from the kitchen, and saw her eyes go to what he had in his hand, and saw the start she gave before she hurried to take the paper away.

  "My gracious! My work—" she said agitatedly, when she had the papers in her hand. She went to her desk, looking perturbed, and gave a quick, seeking glance at the scattered papers there; then at Starr.

  "Did any more—?"

  "That's all," Starr said gravely. "It was the wind when I opened the door, caught them."

  "My own carelessness. I don't know why I left my desk open," she said. And while he stood looking at her, she pulled down the roll-top with a slam, still visibly perturbed.

  It was strange, he thought, that she should have a roll-top desk out here, anyway. He had seen it the other time he was at the house, and it had struck him then as queer, though he had not given it more than a passing thought.

  As a matter of fact, it was not queer. Johnny Calvert had dilated on the destructiveness of rats, "pack rats" he called them. They would chew paper all to bits, he said. So Helen May, being finicky about having her papers chewed, had brought along this mouse-proof desk with her other furniture from Los Angeles.

  Her perturbed manner, too, was the result of a finicky distaste for having any disorder in her papers, especially when it was work intrusted to her professionally. She never talked about the work she did for people, and she always kept it away from the eyes of those not concerned in it. That, she considered, was professional etiquette. She had strained a point when she had read a little of the manuscript to Vic. Vic was just a kid, and he was her brother, and he wouldn't understand what she read any more than would the horned toad down by the spring. But Starr was different, and she felt that she had been terribly careless and unprofessional, leaving the manuscript where pages could blow around the room. What if a page had blown outside and got lost!

  Starr had turned his back and was staring out of the window. He might have been staring at a blank wall, for all he saw through the glass. He was as pale as though he had just received some great physical shock, and he had his hands doubled up into fists, so that his knuckles were white. His eyes were almost gray instead of hazel, and they were hard and hurt-looking.

  Something in the set of his head and in the way his shoulders had stiffened told Helen May that things had gone wrong just in the last few minutes. She gave him a second questioning glance, felt her heart go heavy while her brain seemed suddenly blank, and retreated to the kitchen.

  Helen May, influenced it may be by Starr's anxious thoughts of her, had dreamed of him; one of those vivid, intimate dreams that color our moods and our thoughts long after we awaken. She had dreamed of being with him in the moonlight again; and Starr had sung again the love song of the desert, and had afterwards taken her in his arms and held her close, and kissed her twice lingeringly, looking deep into her eyes afterwards.

  She had awakened with the thrill of those kisses still tingling her lips, so that she had covered her face with both hands in a sort of shamed joy that dreams could be so terribly real—so terribly sweet, too. And then, not fifteen minutes after she awoke, and while the dream yet clogged her reason, Starr himself had confronted her when she opened the door. She would have been a remarkable young woman if she had not been flustered and nervous and inclined toward incoherent speech.

  And now, it was perfectly idiotic to judge a man's temper by the back of his neck, she told herself fiercely in the kitchen; perfectly idiotic, yet she did it. She was impressed with his displeasure, his bitterness, with some change in him which she could not define to herself. She wanted to cry, and she did not in the least know what there could possibly be to cry about.

  Vic appeared, tousled and yawning and stupid as an owl in the sun. He growled because the water bucket was empty and he must go to the spring, and he irritated Helen May to the point of wanting to shake him, when he went limping down the path. She even called out sharply that he was limping with the wrong foot, and that he ought to tie a string around his lame ankle so he could remember which one it was. Which made her feel more disagreeable than ever, because Vic really did have a bad ankle, as the swelling had proven when he went to bed last night.

  Nothing seemed to go right, after that. She scorched the bacon, and she caught her sleeve on the handle of the coffee pot and spilled about half the coffee, besides burning her wrist to a blister. She broke a cup, but that had been cracked when she came, and at any other time she would not have been surprised at all, or jarred out of her calm. She took out the muffins she had hurried to make for Starr, and they stuck to the tins and came out in ragged pieces, which is enough to drive any woman desperate, I suppose. Vic slopped water on the floor when he came back with the bucket full, and the wind swooped a lot of sand into the kitchen, and she was certain the bacon would be gritty as well as burned.

  Of Starr she had not heard a sound, and she went to the door nervously to call him when breakfast was at last on the table. He was standing exactly as he had stood when she left the room. So far as she could see, he had not moved a muscle or turned his head or winked an eyelid. His stoniness chilled her so that it was an effort to form words to tell him that breakfast was ready.

  There was an instant's pause before he turned, and Helen May felt that he had almost decided not to eat. But he followed her to the kitchen and spoke to Vic quite humanly, as he took the chair she offered, and unfolded the napkin that struck an odd note of refinement among its makeshift surroundings; for the stove had only two real legs, the other two corners being propped up on rocks; the dish cupboard was of boxes, and everything in the way of food supplies stood scantily hidden behind thin curtains of white dotted swiss that Helen May had brought with her.

  An hour ago Starr would have dwelt gloatingly upon these graceful evidences of Helen May's brave fight against the crudities of her surroundings. Now they gave him a keener thrust of pain. So did the tremble of her hand when Helen May poured his coffee; it betrayed to Starr her guilty fear that he had seen what was on those two papers. He glanced up at her face, and caught her own troubled glance just flicking away from him. She was scared, then! he told himself. She was watching to see if he had read anything that seemed suspicious. Well, he'd have to calm her down a little, just as a matter of policy. He couldn't let her tip him off to the bunch, whatever happened.

  Starr smiled. "I sure feel like I'm imposing on good nature," he said, looking at her again with careful friendliness. "Coming here begging for breakfast, and now when you've gone to the trouble of cooking it, I've got one of my pet headaches that won't let me enjoy anything. Hits me that way sometimes when I've had an extra long ride. But I sure wish it had waited awhile."

  Helen May gave him a quick, hopeful smile. "I have some awfully good tablets," she said. "Wait till I give you one, before you eat. My doctor gave me a supply before I left home, because I have headache so much—or did have. I'm getting much better, out here! I've hardly felt like the same person, the last two or three weeks."

/>   "You have got to show me where you're any better acting," Vic pointed out, with the merciless candor of beauty's young brother. "It sure ain't your disposition that's improved, I can tell you those."

  "And with those few remarks you can close," Helen May retorted gleefully, hurrying off to get the headache tablet. It was just a headache, poor fellow! He wasn't peeved at all, and nothing was wrong!

  It was astonishing how her mood had lightened in the past two minutes. She got him a glass of water to help the tablet down his throat, and stood close beside him while he swallowed it and thanked her, and began to make some show of eating his breakfast. She was, in fact, the same whimsically charming Helen May he had come to care a great deal for.

  That made things harder than ever for Starr. If the tablet had been prescribed for heartache rather than headache, Starr would have swallowed thankfully the dose. The murder, over against the other line of hills, had not seemed to him so terrible as those sheets of scribbled paper locked away inside Helen May's desk. The grief of Estan's mother over her dead son was no more bitter than was Starr's grief at what he believed was true of Helen May. Indeed, Starr's trouble was greater, because he must mask it with a smile.

  All through breakfast he talked with her, looked into her eyes, smiled at her across the table. But he was white under his tan. She thought that was from his headache, and was kinder than she meant to be because of it; perhaps because of her dream too, though she was not conscious of any change in her manner.

  Starr could have cursed her for that change, which he believed was a sly attempt to win him over and make him forget anything he may have read on those pages. He would not think of it then; time enough when he was away and need not pretend or set a guard over his features and his tongue. The hurt was there, the great, incredible, soul-searing hurt; but he would not dwell upon what had caused that hurt. He forced himself to talk and to laugh now and then, but afterwards he could not remember what they had talked about.

  As soon as he decently could, he went away again into the howling wind that had done him so ill a turn. He did not know what he should do; this discovery that Helen May was implicated had set him all at sea, but he felt that he must get away somewhere and think the whole thing out before he went crazy.

  He left the Basin, rode around behind it and, leaving Rabbit in the thicket where he had left him the day before, he toiled up the pinnacle and sat down in the shelter of a boulder pile where he would be out of the wind as well as out of sight, and where he could still stare somberly down at the cabin.

  And there he faced his trouble bravely, and at the same time he fulfilled his duty toward his government by keeping a watch over the place that seemed to him then the most suspicious place in the country. The office of Las Nuevas, even, was not more so, as Starr saw things then. For if Las Nuevas were the distributing point for the propaganda literature, this cabin of Helen May's seemed to be the fountain head.

  First of all, and going back to the beginning, how did he really know that her story was true? How, for instance, did he know that her father had not been one of the heads of the conspiracy? How did he know that her father—it might even be her husband!—was dead? He had simply accepted her word, as a matter of course, because she was a young woman, and more attractive than the average young woman. Starr was terribly bitter, at that point in his reasoning, and even felt certain that he hated all women. Well, then, her reason for being in the neighborhood would bear a lot of looking into.

  Then there was that automobile that had passed where he had found her and her goats, that evening. Was it plausible, he asked himself, that she had actually walked over there? The machine had returned along the same trail, running by moonlight with its lights out. Might it not have been coming to pick her up? Only he had happened along, and she had let him walk home with her, probably to keep him where she could watch him!

  There was that shot at him from the pinnacle behind her cabin. There was her evident familiarity with firearms, though she professed not to own a gun. There was the man who had been down there with her, not more than an hour after he had left her with a bullet burn across his arm. Starr saw now how that close conversation might easily have been a conference between her and the man who had shot at him.

  There was the light in her window at one o'clock in the morning, and the machine with dimmed headlights making toward her place. There was her evident caution against undesirable callers, her coming to the door with a six-shooter hidden against her skirt. There was that handwriting, to which Starr would unhesitatingly have sworn as being the same as on the pages he had found in the office of Las Nuevas. The writing was unmistakable: fine, even, symmetrical as print, yet hard to decipher; slanting a little to the left instead of the right. He had studied too often the pages in his pocket not to recognize it at a glance.

  Most damning evidence of all the evidence against her were two or three words which his eyes had picked from the context on the page uppermost in his hand. He had become familiar with those words, written in that peculiar chirography. "Justice… submission … ruling …" He had caught them at a glance, though he did not know how they were connected, or what relation they bore to the general theme. Political bunk, his mind tagged it therefore, and had no doubt whatever that he was right.

  "She's got brown eyes and blond hair, and that looks like mixed blood," he reminded himself suddenly, after he had sat for a long while staring down at the house. "How do I know her folks aren't Spanish or something? How do I know anything about her? I just swallowed what she handed out—like a damn' fool!"

  Just after noon, when the wind had shown some sign of dying down to a more reasonable blow, Helen May came forth in her riding skirt and a Tam o' Shanter cap and a sweater, with a package under her arm—a package of manuscript which she had worked late to finish and was now going to deliver.

  She got the pinto pony which Vic had just ridden sulkily down to the corral and left for her, and she rode away down the trail, jolting a good deal in the saddle when the pinto trotted a few steps, but apparently well pleased with herself.

  Starr watched until she turned into the main trail that led toward San Bonito. Then, when he was reasonably sure of the direction she meant to take, he hurried down to where Rabbit waited, mounted that long-suffering animal and followed, using short cuts and deep washes that would hide him from sight, but keeping Helen May in view most of the time for all that.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  HOLMAN SOMMERS TURNS PROPHET

  Holman Sommers, clad outwardly in old wool trousers of a dingy gray, a faded brown smoking jacket that had shrunk in many washings until it was three inches too short in the sleeves, and old brown slippers, sat tilted back in a kitchen chair against the wall of his house and smoked a beautifully colored meerschaum with solid gold bands and a fine amber mouthpiece, while he conferred comfortably with one Elfigo Apodaca.

  There was no quizzical twinkle in the eyes of Holman Sommers, vividly alive though they were always. With his low slipper heels hooked over the rung of his chair and his right hand nursing the bowl of his pipe and his black hair rumpled in the wind, he was staring at the granite ridge somberly.

  "I am indeed sorry to hear that Estan Medina was shot," he said after a pause. "Even in the interests of the Cause it was absolutely unjustifiable. The man could do no harm; indeed, he served to divert suspicion from others. Only crass stupidity would resort to brute violence in the effort to further propaganda. Laying aside the human—"

  "Of course," Elfigo interrupted sarcastically, "there's nothing violent in a revolution! Where do you get your argument for gentleness, Holly? That's what bothers me. You can stir up a bunch of Mexicans quicker than a barrel of mezcal with your revolution talks."

  "Ah, but you do not take into account the great, fundamental truth that cooperative effort, on the part of the proletariat, is wholly justifiable, in that it furthers the good of all humanity. Whereas violence on the part of the individual merely retards the final result
for which we are striving. The murder of Estan Medina, for instance, may be the one display of individual violence which will nullify all our efforts toward a common good.

  "For myself, I am bending every energy toward the formation of a cooperative colony which will demonstrate the feasibility of a cooperative form of government for the whole nation—the whole world, in fact. Your Junta has pledged itself to the assistance of this colony, the incalculable benefits of which will, I verily believe, be the very salvation of Mexico as a nation. Mexico, now in the throes of national parturition, is logically the pioneer in the true socialistic form of government. From Mexico the seed will be carried overseas to drop upon soil made fertile by the bones of those sacrificed to the blood-lust of the war mad lords of Europe.

  "Here, in this little corner of the world, is where the first tiny plant must be grown. Can you not grasp, then, the tremendous significance of what, on the face of it, is the pitifully small attempt of a pitifully weak people to strike a feeble blow for the freedom of labor? To frustrate that feeble blow now, by the irresponsible, lawless murder of a good citizen, merely because he failed at first to grasp the meaning of the lesson placed before him to learn, is, to my way of thinking, not only unjustifiable but damnably weak and reprehensible."

  Elfigo Apodaca, in another kitchen chair tilted back against an angle of the wall so that he half faced Holman Sommers, stretched out his legs and smiled tolerantly. A big, good-looking, thoroughly Americanized Mexican was Elfigo; the type of man who may be found at sunrise whipping the best stream in the State, the first morning of the trout season; the type of man whose machine noses in the closest to the judge's stand when a big race is on; the type of man who dances most, collects the most picture postals of pretty girls, laughs most at after-dinner speeches; the type of man who either does not marry at all, or attains much notoriety when the question of alimony is being fought out to the last cipher; the last man you would point out as a possible conspirator against anything save the peace and dignity of some other man's home. But it takes money to be all of these things, and Elfigo could see a million or two ahead of him along the revolution trail. That is why he smiled tolerantly upon his colleague who talked of humanity instead of dollars.