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.
Like most of us, Starr did not dazzle at the first sight. One must come
into close contact with him to find him different from any other passably
attractive, intelligent man of the open. Oh, if you must have his age, I
think he gave it at thirty-one, the last time he was asked, but he might
have said twenty-five and been believed. He was bashful, and he got on
better with men than he did with women; but if you will stop to think,
most decent men do if they have lived under their hats since they grew to
the long-trouser age. And if they have spent their working days astride a
stock saddle, you may be sure they are bashful unless they are overbold
and impossible. Well, Starr was of the bashful, easily stampeded type. As
to his morals, he smoked and he swore a good deal upon occasion, and he
drank, and he played pool, and now and then a little poker, and he would
lie for a friend any time it was necessary and think nothing of it. Also,
he would fight whenever the occasion seemed to warrant it. He had not
been to church since he wore square collars starched and spread across
his shoulders, and the shine of soap on his cheeks. And a pretty girl
would better not make eyes too boldly if she objected to being kissed,
although Starr had never in his life asked a girl to marry him.
It doesn't sound very promising for a hero. He really was just a human
being and no saint. Saint? You wouldn't think so if you had heard what
he said to his horse, Rabbit, just about an hour before you were
introduced to him.
Rabbit, it seems had been pacing along, half asleep in the blistering
heat of midday, among the cactus and the greasewood and those
depressing, yellowish weeds that pretend to be clothing the desert with
verdure, when they are merely emphasizing its barrenness. Starr had
been half asleep too, riding with one leg over the saddle horn to rest
his muscles, and with his hat brim pulled down over his eyebrows to
shade his eyes from the pitiless glare of New Mexico sunlight. Rabbit
might be depended upon to dodge the prairie dog holes and rocks and
dirt hummocks, day or night, waking or sleeping; and since they were
riding cross-country anyway, miles from a trail, and since they were
headed for water, and Rabbit knew as well as Starr just where it was to
be found, Starr held the reins slack in his thumb and finger and let
the horse alone.
That was all right, up to a certain point. Rabbit was a perfectly
dependable little range horse, and sensible beyond most horses. He was
ambling along at his easy little fox-trot that would carry Starr many a
mile in a day, and he had his eyes half shut against the sun glare, and
his nose almost at a level with his knees. I suppose he was dreaming of
cool pastures or something like that, when a rattlesnake, coiled in the
scant shade of a weed, lifted his tail and buzzed as stridently, as
abruptly as thirteen rattles and a button can buzz.
Rabbit had been bitten once when he was a colt and had gone around with
his head swollen up like a barrel for days. He gave a great, horrified
snort, heaved himself straight up in the air, whirled on his hind feet
and went bucking across the scenery like a rodeo outlaw.
Starr did not accompany him any part of the distance. Starr had gone off
backward and lit on his neck, which I assure you is painful and
disturbing to one's whole physical and moral framework. I'll say this
much for Starr: The first thing he did when he got up was to shoot the
head off the snake, whose tail continued to buzz in a dreary, aimless way
when there was absolutely nothing to buzz about. Snakes are like that.
Starr was a little like that, also. He continued to cuss in a fretful,
objectless way, even after Rabbit had stopped and waited for him with
apology written in the very droop of his ears. When he had remounted, and
the horse had settled again to his straight-backed, shuffling fox-trot,
Starr would frequently think of something else to say upon the subject of
fool horses and snakes and long, dry miles and the interminable desert;
but since none of the things would bear repeating, we will let it go at
that. The point is that Starr was no saint.
He knew of a spring where the water was sweet and cold, and where a
lonesome young fellow lived by himself and was always glad to see some
one ride up to his door. The young fellow was what is called a good
feeder, and might be depended upon to have a pot of frijoles cooked, and
sourdough bread, and stewed fruit of some kind even in his leanest times,
and call himself next door to starvation. And if he happened to be in
funds, there was no telling; Starr, for instance, had eaten canned plum
pudding and potted chicken and maraschino cherries and ginger snaps, all
at one sitting, when he happened to strike the fellow just after selling
a few sheep. Thinking of these things, Starr clucked to Rabbit and told
him for gosh sake to pick his feet off the ground and not to take root
and grow there in the desert like a several-kinds of a so-and-so cactus.
Rabbit twitched back his ears to catch the drift of Starr's remarks,
rattled his teeth in a bored yawn, and shuffled on. Starr laughed.
"Durn it, why is it you never take me serious?" he complained. "I can
name over all the mean things you are, and you just waggle one ear, much
as to say, 'Aw, hell! Same ole tune, and nothing to it but noise.' Some
of these days you're going to get your pedigree read to you--and read
right!" He leaned forward and lovingly lifted Rabbit's mane, holding it
for a minute or two away from the sweaty neck. "Sure's hot out here
to-day, ain't it, pardner?" he murmured, and let the mane fall again into
place. "Kinda fries out the grease, don't it? If young Calvert's got any
hoss-feed in camp, I'm going to beg some off him. Get along, the faster
you go, the quicker you'll get there."
The desert gave place to scattered, brown cobblestones of granite. Rabbit
picked his way carefully among these, setting his feet down daintily in
the interstices of the rocks. He climbed a long slope that proved itself
to be a considerable hill when one looked back at the desert below. The
farther side was more abrupt, and he took it in patient zigzags where the
footing promised some measure of security. At the bottom he turned short
off to the right and made his way briskly along a rough wagon trail that
hugged the hillside.
"Fresh tracks going in--and then out again," Starr announced musingly
to Rabbit. "Maybe young Calvert hired a load of grub brought out; that,
or he's had a visitor in the last day or two--maybe a week back,
though; this dry ground holds tracks a long while. Go on, it's only a
mile or so now."
The trail took a sudden turn toward the bottom of the wide depression as
though it wearied of dodging rocks and preferred the loose sand below. Of
his own accord Rabbit broke into a steady lope, flinging his head
sidewise now and then to discourage the pestiferous gnats that swarmed
about his ears. Starr, also driven to action of some kind, began to fling
his hands in long sweeping gestures past his face. He hoped that the
cabin, being on a higher bit of ground, would be free from the pests.
Bounding a sharp turn, Starr glimpsed the cabin and frowned as something
unfamiliar in its appearance caught his attention. For just a minute he
could not name the change, and then "Curtains at the windows!" he
snorted. "Now, has the dub gone and got married, wonder?" He hoped not,
and his hope was born not so much from sympathy with any woman who must
live in such a place, but from a very humanly, selfish regard for his own
passing comfort. With a woman in the cabin, Starr would not feel so free
to break his journey there with a rest and a meal or two.
He went on, however, sitting passively in the saddle while Rabbit headed
straight for the spring. The bit of white curtain at the one small,
square window facing that way troubled Starr, though it could not turn
him back thirsty into the desert.
It was Rabbit who, ignorant of the significance of that flapping bit of
white, was taken unawares and ducked sidewise when Helen May, standing
precariously on a rock beside the spring, cupped her hands around her
sun-cracked lips and shouted "Vic!" at the top of her voice. She nearly
fell off the rock when she saw the horse and rider so close. They had
come on her from behind, round another sharp nose of the rock-strewn
hillside, so that she did not see them until they had discovered her.
"Oh!" said Helen May quite flatly, dropping her hands from her sunburned
face and looking Starr over with the self-possessed, inquiring eyes of
one who is accustomed to gazing upon strange faces by the thousands.
"How do you do?" said Starr, lifting his hat and foregoing instinctively
the easy "Howdy" of the plains. "Is--Mr. Calvert at home?"
"That depends," said Helen May, "on where he calls home. He isn't
here, however."
Rabbit, not in the least confused by the presence of a girl in this
out-of-the-way place, pushed forward and thrust his nose deep into the
lower pool of the spring where the water was warmed a little by the sun
on the rocks. Starr could not think of anything much to say, so he sat
leaning forward with a hand on Rabbit's mane, and watched the muscles
working along the neck, when the horse swallowed.
"Oh--would you mind killing that beast down there in that little hollow?"
Helen May had decided that it would be silly to keep on shouting for Vic
when this man was here. "It's what they call a young Gila Monster, I
think. And the bite is said to be fatal. I don't like the way he keeps
looking at me. I believe he's getting ready to jump at me."
Starr glanced quickly at her face, which was perfectly serious and even a
trifle anxious, and then down in the direction indicated by a
broken-nailed, pointing finger. He did not smile, though he felt like it.
He looked again at Helen May.
"It's a horned toad," he informed her gravely. "The one Johnny Calvert
kept around for a pet, I reckon. He won't bite--but I'll kill it if you
say so." He dismounted and picked up a stone, and then looked at her
again inquiringly.
Helen May eyed the toad askance. "Of course, if it's accustomed to being
a pet--but it looks perfectly diabolical. It--came after me."
"It thought you would feed it, maybe."
"Well, I won't. It can think again," said Helen May positively. "You
needn't kill it, but if you'd chase it off somewhere out of sight--it
gives me shivers. I don't like the way it stares at a person and blinks."
Starr went over and picked up the toad, holding it cupped between his
palms. He carried it a hundred feet away, set it down gently on the
farther side of a rock, and came back. "Lots of folks keep them for
pets," he said. "They're harmless, innocent things."
He washed his hands in the pool where Rabbit had drunk, took the tin
can that had stood on a ledge in the shade when Starr first came to the
spring a year ago, and dipped it full from the inner pool that was
always cool under the rocks. He turned his back to Helen May and drank
satisfyingly. The can was rusted and it leaked a swift succession of
drops that was almost a stream. Helen May decided that she would bring a
white granite cup to the spring and throw the can away. It was
unsanitary, and it leaked frightfully, and it was a disgrace to
civilized thirst.
"Pretty hot, to-day," Starr observed, when he had emptied the can and put
it back. He turned and pulled the reins up along Rabbit's neck and took
the stirrup in his hand.
"Oh, won't you stop--for lunch? It's a long way to town." Helen May
flushed behind her sunburn, but she felt that the law of the desert
demanded some show of hospitality.
"Thanks, I must be getting on," said Starr, touched his hat brim and
rode away. He had a couple of fried-ham sandwiches in his pocket, and
he ought to make the Medina ranch by two o'clock, he reminded himself
philosophically. A woman on Johnny Calvert's claim was disconcerting.
What was she there for, anyway? From the way she spoke about Johnny,
she couldn't be his wife, or if she were, she had a grudge against
him. She didn't look like the kind of a girl that would marry the
Johnny Calvert kind of a man. Maybe she was just stopping there for a
day or so, with her folks. Still, that white curtain at the window
looked permanent, somehow.
Starr studied the puzzle from all angles. He might have stayed and had
his curiosity satisfied, but it was second nature with Starr to hide any
curiosity he might feel; his riding matter-of-factly away, as though the
girl were a logical part of the place, was not all bashfulness. Partly it
was habit. He wondered who Vic was--man, woman or child? Man, he guessed,
since she was probably calling for help with the horned toad, Starr
grinned when he thought of her naming it a Gila Monster. If she had ever
seen one of those babies! She must certainly be new to the country, if
she didn't even know a horned toad when she saw one! What was she doing
there, anyway? Starr meant to find out. It was his business to find out,
and besides, he wanted to know.
CHAPTER FIVE
A GREASE SPOT IN THE SAND
Starr, took his cigarette from his lips, sent an oblique glance of mental
measurement towards his host, and shifted his saddle-weary person to a
more comfortable position on the rawhide covered couch. He had eaten his
fill of frijoles and tortillas and a chili stew hot enough to crisp the
tongue. He had discussed the price of sheep and had with much dickering
bought fifty dry ewes at so much on foot delivered at the nearest
shipping point. He had given what news was public talk, of the great war
and the supposedly present whereabouts of Villa, and what was guessed
would happen if Mexican money went any lower.
On his own part, Estancio Medina, called Estan for short, had talked very
freely of these things. Villa, he was a bad one, sure. He would yet make
trouble if some_body_ didn't catch him, yes. For himself, Estan Medina,
he was glad to be on this side the border, yes. The American government
would let a poor man alone, yes. He could have his little home and his
few sheep, and no_body_ would take them away. Villa, he was a bad one!
All Mexicans must sure hate Villa--even the men who did his fighting for
him, yes. Burros, that's what they are. Burros, that have no mind for
thinking, only to do what is tol'. And if troubles come, all Mexicans in
these country should fight for their homes, you bet. All these Mexicans
ought to know what's good for them. They got no business to fight gainst
these American gov'ment, not much, they don't. They come here because
they don't like it no more in Mexico where no poor man can have a home
like here. You bet.
Estan Medina was willing to talk a long while on that subject. His
mother, sitting just inside the doorway, nodded her head now and then and
smiled just as though she knew what her son was saying; proud of his high
learning, she was. He could talk with the Americanos, and they listened
with respect. Their language he could speak, better than they could speak
it themselves. Did she not know? She herself could now and then
understand what he was talking about, he spoke so plainly.
"You've got new neighbors, I see," Starr observed irrelevantly, when
Estan paused to relight his cigarette. "Over at Johnny Calvert's," he
added, when Estan looked at him inquiringly.
"Oh-h, yes! That poor boy and girl! You seen them?"
"I just came from there," Starr informed him easily. "What brought them
away out here?"
"They not tell, then? That man Calvert, he's a bad one, sure! He don'
stay no more--too lazy, I think, to watch his sheeps from the coyotes,
and says they're stole. He comes here telling me I got his sheeps--yes.
We quarrel a little bit, maybe. I don' like to be called thief, you bet.
He's big mouth, that feller--no brains, aitre. Then he goes some_where_,
and he tells what fine rancho he's got in Sunlight Basin. These boy and
girl, they buy. That's too bad. They don' belong on these desert, sure.
W'at they know about hard life? Pretty soon they get tired, I think, and
go back where comes from. That boy--what for help he be to that girl?
Jus' boy--not so old my brother Luis. Can't ride horse; goes up and down,
up an' down like he's back goes through he's hat. What that girl do? Jus'
slim, big-eye girl with soft hand and sickness of lungs. Babes, them boy
and girl. Whan Calvert he should be shot dead for let such inocentes be
fool like that."
"Where is Johnny Calvert?"
"Him? He's gone, sure! Not come back, I bet you! He's got money--them
babes got rancho--" Estan lifted his shoulders eloquently.
"What are they going to do, now they're here?" Starr abstractedly wiped
off the ash collar of his cigarette against the edge of the couch.
"_Quien sabe_?" countered Estan, and lifted his shoulders again. "I think
pretty quick they go."
Starr looked at his watch, yawned, and rose with much evident reluctance.
"Same here," he said. "I've got to make San Bonito in time for that
Eastbound. You have the sheep in the stockyards by Saturday, will you? If
I'm not there myself, I'll leave the money with Johnson at the express
office. Soon as the sheep's inspected, you can go there and get it.
_Addios. Mucho gracias, Señora_."
"She likes you fine--my mother," Estan observed, as the two sauntered to
the corral where Rabbit was stowing away as much _secate_ as he could
against future hunger. "Sometimes you come and stay longer. We not see so
many peoples here. Nobody likes to cross desert when she's hot like this.
Too bad you must go now."
Starr agreed with him and talked the usual small talk of the desert
Places while he placed the saddle on Rabbit's still sweaty back. He went
away down the rocky trail with the sun shining full on his right cheek,
and was presently swallowed up by the blank immensity of the land that
looked level as a floor from a distance, but which was a network of small
ridges and shallow draws and "dry washes" when one came to ride over it.
The trail was narrow and had many inconsequential twists and turns in it,
as though the first man to travel that way had gone blind or dizzy and
could not hold a straight line across the level. When an automobile, for
instance, traveled that road, it was with many skiddings in the sand on
the turns, which it must take circumspectly if the driver did not care
for the rocky, uneven floor of the desert itself.
Just lately some one had actually preferred to make his own trail, if
tracks told anything. Within half a mile of the Medina rancho Starr saw
where an automobile had swerved sharply off the trail and had taken to
the hard-packed sand of a dry arroyo that meandered barrenly off to the
southeast. He turned and examined the trail over which he had traveled,
saw that it offered no more discouragement to an automobile than any
other bit of trail in that part of the country, and with another glance
at the yellow ribbon of road before him, he also swerved to the
southeast.
For a mile the machine had labored, twisting this way and that to avoid
rocky patches or deep cuts where the spring freshets had dug out the
looser soil. So far as Starr could discover there was nothing to bring a
machine up here. The arroyo was as thousands of other arroyos in that
country. The sides sloped up steeply, or were worn into perpendicular
banks. It led nowhere in particular; it was not a short cut to any place
that he knew of. The trail to Medina's ranch was shorter and smoother,
supposing Medina's ranch were the objective point of the trip.
Starr could not see any sense in it, and that is why he followed the
tortuous track to where the machine had stopped. That it had stood there
for some time he knew by the amount of oil that had leaked down into the
sand. He did not know for certain, since he did not know the oil-leaking
habits of that particular car, but he guessed that it had stood there for
a couple of hours at least before the driver had backed and turned around
to retrace his way to the trail.
In these days of gasoline travel one need not be greatly surprised to
meet a car, or see the traces of one, in almost any out-of-the-way spot
where four wheels can possibly be made to travel. On the other hand, the
man at the wheel is not likely to send his machine over rocks and through
sand where the traction is poor, and across dry ditches and among
greasewood, just for the fun of driving. There is sport with rod or gun
to lure, or there is necessity to impel, or the driver is lost and wants
to reach some point that looks familiar, or he is trying to dodge
something or somebody.
Starr sat beside that grease spot in the sand and smoked a cigarette
and studied the surrounding hills and tried to decide what had brought
the car up here. Not sport, unless it was hunting of jack rabbits; and
there were more jack rabbits out on the flat than here. There was no
trout stream near, at least, none that was not more accessible from
another point. To be sure, some tenderfoot tourist might have been told
some yarn that brought him up here on a wild-goose chase. You can,
thought Starr, expect any fool thing of a tourist. He remembered running
across one that was trying between trains to walk across the mesa from
Albuquerque to the Sandia mountains. It had been hard to convince that
particular specimen that he was not within a mile or so of his goal, and
that he would do well to reach the mountains in another three hours or
so of steady walking. Compared with that, driving a car up this arroyo
did not look so foolish.