Starr, of the Desert

by B. M. Bower

He went up on the shoulder of the man who was to watch outside the rear wall, and straddled the wall for a brief reconnoiter. Evidently the Junta felt safe in their hidden little room, for no guard had been left in the yard. The back door was locked, and Starr opened it as silently as he could with his pass key. Close behind him came Sheriff O'Malley and the chief of police, whose name was Whittier. They had left their shoes beside the doorstep and walked in their socks, making no noise at all.

Starr did not dare use his searchlight, but felt his way down past the press and the forms, to where the stairs went up to the second floor. On the third step from the bottom, Starr, feeling his way with his hands, touched a dozing watchman and choked him into submission before the fellow had emitted more than a sleepy grunt of surprise. They left him gagged and tied to the iron leg of some heavy piece of machinery, and went on up the stairs, treading as stealthily as a prowling cat.

Starr turned to the right, found the door locked, and patiently turned his key a hair's breadth at a time in the lock, until he slid the bolt back. Behind him the repressed breathing of O'Malley fanned warmly the back of his neck. He pushed the door open a half inch at a time, found the outer office dark and silent, and crossed it stealthily to the closet behind the stove. O'Malley and Whittier were so close behind that he could feel them as they entered the closet and crept along its length.

Starr was reaching out before him with his hands, feeling for the door into the secret office, when Sheriff O'Malley struck his foot against the old tin spittoon, tried to cover the sound, and ran afoul of the brooms, which tripped him and sent him lurching against Starr. There in that small space where everything had been so deathly still the racket was appalling. O'Malley was not much given to secret work; he forgot himself now and swore just as full-toned and just as fluently as though be had tripped in the dark over his own wheelbarrow in his own back yard.

Starr threw himself against the end of the closet where he knew the door was hidden in the wall, felt the yielding of a board, and heaved against it with his shoulder. He landed almost on top of a fat-jowled representative from Santa Fé, but he landed muzzle foremost, as it were, and he was telling the twelve to put up their hands even before he had his feet solidly planted on the floor.

Holman Sommers sat facing him. He had been writing, and he still held his pencil in his hand. He slowly crumpled the sheet of paper, his vivid eyes lifted to Starr's face. Tragic eyes they were then, for beyond Starr they looked into the stern face of the government he would have defied. They looked upon the wreck of his dearest dream; upon the tightening chains of the wage slaves he would have freed—or so he dreamed.

Starr stared back, his own mind visioning swiftly the havoc he had wrought in the dream of this leader of men. He saw, not a political outlaw caught before he could do harm to his country, but a man fated to bear in his great brain an idea born generations too soon into a brawling world of ideas that warred always with sordid circumstance. A hundred years hence this man might be called great. Now he was nothing more than a political outlaw chief, trapped with his band of lesser outlaws.

Sommers' eyes lightened impishly. His thin lips twisted in a smile at the damnable joke which Life was playing there in that room.

"Gentlemen of the Junta," he said in his sonorous, public-platform voice, "I find it expedient, because of untoward circumstances, to advise that you make no resistance. From the unceremonious and unheralded entry of our esteemed opponents, these political prostitutes who have had the effrontery to come here in the employ of a damnable system of political tyranny and frustrate our plans for the liberation of our comrades in slavery, I apprehend the fact that we have been basely betrayed by some foul Judas among us. I am left with no alternative but to advise that you surrender your bodies to these minions of what they please to call the law.

"Whether we part now, to spend the remaining years of our life in some foul dungeon; whether to die a martyr's death on the scaffold, or whether the workers of the land awake to their power and, under some wiser, stronger leadership, liberate us to enjoy the fruits of the harvest we have but sown, I cannot attempt to prophesy. We have done what we could for our fellowmen. We have not failed, for though we perish, yet our blood shall fructify what we have sown, that our sons and our sons' sons may reap the garnered grain. Gentlemen, of the Junta, I declare our meeting adjourned!"