Vic was impressed, impressed to a round-eyed silence. He knew his dad's handwriting, and he unfolded the sheet and read what Peter had written.
"I found that letter in—his hand—that morning." Helen May tried to keep her voice steady. "You mustn't tell any one about it, Vic. They mustn't know. But you see, he—after doing that to get the money for me, why—you see, Vic, we've got to go there. And we've got to make good. We've got to."
There must have been a little of Peter's disposition in Vic, too. He lay for several minutes staring hard at a patch of sunlight on the farther wall. I suppose when one is fifteen the ambition to be a movie star dies just as hard as does later the ambition to be president of the United States.
"You see, don't you, Vic?" Helen May watched him nervously.
"Well, what do you think I am?" Vic turned upon her with a scowl. "You might have said it was for your health. You wasn't playing fair. You—you kept saying it was to raise goats!"
CHAPTER FOUR
STARR WOULD LIKE TO KNOW
Properly speaking Starr did not belong to New Mexico. He was a Texas man, and, until a certain high official asked him to perform a certain mission for the Secret Service, he had been a ranger. Puns were made upon his name when he was Ranger Starr, but he was a ranger no longer, and the puns had ceased to trouble him. His given name was Chauncy DeWitt; perhaps that is why even his closest friends called him Starr, it was so much easier to say, and it seemed to fit him so much better.
Ostensibly, and for a buffer to public curiosity, Starr was acting in the modest capacity of cattle buyer for a big El Paso meat company. Incidentally he bought young sheep in season, and chickens from the Mexican ranchers, and even a bear that had been shot up in the mountains very early in the spring, before the fat had given place to leanness. Whatever else Starr did he kept carefully to himself, but his meat buying was perfectly authentic and satisfactory. And if those who knew his past record wondered at his occupation, Starr had plenty of reasons for the change, and plenty of time in which to explain those reasons.
As to his personal appearance, there is not a great deal to say. I'm afraid Starr would not have attracted any notice in a crowd. He was a trifle above average height, perhaps, and he had nice eyes whose color might be a matter of dispute; because they were a bit too dark for gray, a bit too light for real hazel, with tiny flecks of green in certain lights. His lashes were almost heavy enough to be called a mark of beauty, and when he took off his hat, which was not often except at mealtime and when he slept in a real bed, there was something very attractive about his forehead and the way his hair grew on his temples. His mouth was pleasant when his mood was pleasant, but that was not always. One front tooth had been gold-crowned, which made his smile a trifle conspicuous, but could not be called a disfigurement. For the rest, he was tanned to a real desert copper, and riding kept him healthily lean. But as I said before, you would never pick him out of a crowd as the hero of this story or of any other.