Starr, of the Desert

by B. M. Bower

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.