Starr, of the Desert

by B. M. Bower

There had been one black night in the cabin—the night before this last one, it was—when he had considered for a while how he might smuggle Helen May out of the country, suppressing the fact of her complicity. He planned just how he could put her on a train and "shoot her to Los Angeles," as he worded it to himself. How she could take a boat there for Vancouver, and how he could hold back developments here until he knew she was safe. He figured the approximate cost and the hole it would make in his little savings account. He thought of everything, even to marrying her before she left, so that he could not be compelled to testify against her, in case she was caught.

He had dozed afterwards, and had dreamed that he put his plan to the test of reality. He had married Helen May and taken her himself to Los Angeles. But there had not been money enough for him to go any farther, and his chief had wired him peremptorily to return and arrest the leaders of the Alliance and all connected with it. So he had bought a steerage ticket for Helen May and put her aboard the boat, where she must herd with a lot of leering Chinamen. He had stood on the pier and watched the boat swing out and nose its way to the open sea, and a submarine had torpedoed it when it had sailed beyond the three-mile limit off the coast, so he could not go after her. He was just taking off his coat to try it, anyway, when he awoke.

That was all the good his sleep had done him: set him upright in bed with a cold sweat on his face and his hands shaking. But the reaction from that nightmare had been complete, and Starr had not again planned how he might dodge his plain duty. But he kept thinking around and around the subject for all that, as though he could not give up entirely the hope of being able to save her somehow.

He did not know, until he passed the corral, that he was already in Sunlight Basin, and that the house stood just up the slope before him. Rabbit must have taken it for granted that Starr was bound for this place and so had kept the trail of his own accord, for Starr could not remember turning from the main road. He did not even know that he had passed not more than a hundred yards from Vic and the goats, and that Vic had shouted "hello" to him.

He took a long breath when he glanced up and saw the house so close, but he did not attempt to dodge or even delay the final tragedy of his mission. He let Rabbit keep straight on. And when the horse stopped before the closed front door, Starr slid off and walked, like a tired old man, to the door and knocked.

Helen May had been washing the breakfast dishes, and Starr heard the muffled sound of her high-heeled slippers clicking over the bare floor for a minute before she came into the front room and opened the door. She had a dish towel over her right arm, opening the door with her left. Starr knew that the dish towel was merely a covering for her six-shooter, and his heart hardened a little at that fresh reminder of her preparedness and her guile.

"Why, good morning, desert man," she said brightly, after the first little start of surprise. "Come on in. The coffee's fine this morning; and I just had a hunch I'd better not throw it out for a while yet. There's a little waffle batter left, too."

Starr had choked down a cup of coffee and a sandwich at the station lunch counter before he left San Bonito, and he was glad now that he was not hungry. He stepped inside, but he did not smile back at Helen May; nor could he have accepted her hospitality to save himself from starvation. He felt enough like Judas as it was.

"Don't put down your gun yet," he said abruptly, standing beside the door with his hat in his hand, as though his visit would be very short. "You can shoot me if you want to, but that's about all the leeway I can give you. I rounded up the revolution leaders last night. They're likely at Fort Bliss by now, so you can take your choice between handing me a bullet, or going along with me to Fort Bliss. Because if I live, that's where I'll have to take you. And," he added as an afterthought, "I don't care much which it is."

Helen May stood with her chin tilted down, and stared at him from under her eyebrows. She did not speak for a minute, and Starr leaned back against the closed door with his arms folded negligently and his hat dangling from one hand, waiting her decision. He stared back at her, somberly apathetic. He had spoken the simple truth when he said he did not care which she decided to do. He had come to the limit of suffering, it seemed to him. He could look into her tawny brown eyes now without any emotion whatever.