Starr, of the Desert

by B. M. Bower

Elfigo Apodaca seemed so thoroughly Americanized that only his swarthy skin and black hair and eyes reminded one that he was after all a son of the south. He did a desultory business in real estate, and owned an immense tract of land, the remnant of an old Spanish grant, and went in for fancy cattle and horses. He seemed more a sportsman than a politician—a broadminded, easy-going man of much money. Starr had still a surprised sensation that the trail should lead to Elfigo. Juan, the brother of Elfigo, he could find it much easier to see in the role of conspirator. But horror does not stop to weigh words, and Starr knew that Luis had spoken the truth in that unguarded moment.

He pondered that other bit of information that had slipped out: "In a month they'll all be killing." That was a point which he and his colleagues had not been able to settle in their own minds, the proposed date of the uprising. In a month! The time was indeed short, but now that they had something definite to work on, a good deal might be done in a month; so on the whole Starr felt surprisingly cheerful. And if Elfigo found himself involved in a murder trial, it would help to hamper his activities with the Alliance. Starr regretted the death of Estan, but he kept thinking of the good that would come of it. He kept telling himself that the shooting of Estan Medina would surely put a crimp in the revolution. Also it would mark Luis for a mate to the bullet that reached Estan, if that hotheaded youth did not hold his tongue.

He was considering the feasibility of sending Luis and his mother out of the country for awhile, when the sheriff and coroner and Luis came rocking down the narrow trail in a roadster built for speed where speed was no pleasure but a necessity.

The sheriff was an ex-cattleman, with a desert-baked face and hard eyes and a disconcerting habit of chewing gum and listening and saying nothing himself. For the sake of secrecy, Starr had avoided any acquaintance with him and his brother officers, so the sheriff gave him several sharp glances while he was viewing the body and the immediate surroundings. Luis had told him, coming out, the meager details of the murder, and he had again accused Elfigo Apodaca, though he had done some real thinking on the way to town, and had cooled to the point where he chose his words more carefully. The sheriff's name was O'Malley, which is reason enough why Luis was chary of confiding Mexican secrets to his keeping.

Elfigo Apodaca had quarreled with Estan, said Luis. He had come to the ranch, and Luis had heard them quarreling over water rights. Elfigo had threatened to "get" Estan, and to "fix" him, and Luis had been afraid that Estan would be shot before the quarrel was over. He had heard the voice that called Estan out of the house that night, and he told the sheriff that he had recognized Elfigo's voice. Luis surely did all he could to settle any doubt in the mind of the sheriff, and he felt that he had been very smart to say they quarreled over water rights; a lawsuit two years ago over that very water-right business lent convincingness to the statement.

The sheriff had not said anything at all after Luis had finished his story of the shooting. He had chewed gum with the slow, deliberate jaw of a cow meditating over her cud, and he had juggled the wheel of his machine and shifted his gears on hills and in sandy stretches with the same matter-of-fact deliberation. Sheriff O'Malley might be called one of the old school of rail-roosting, stick-whittling thinkers. He took his time, and he did not commit himself too impulsively to any cause. But he could act with surprising suddenness, and that made him always an uncertain factor, so that lawbreakers feared him as they feared nightmares.

The sheriff, then, stood around with his hands in his pockets and his feet planted squarely under him, squeezing a generous quid of gum between his teeth and very slightly teetering on heels and toes, while the coroner made a cursory examination and observed, since it was coming gray daylight, how the lamp lay shattered just where it had fallen with Estan. He asked, in bad Spanish, a few questions of the grief-worn señora, who answered him dully as she had answered Starr. She had heard the call, yes.

"You know Elfigo Apodaca?" the sheriff asked suddenly, and watched how the eyes of the señora went questioningly, uneasily, to Luis; watched how she hesitated before she admitted that she knew him.

"You know his voice?"

But the señora closed her thin lips and shook her head, and in a minute she laid her head back on the pillow and closed her eyes also, and would talk no more.