Estan himself was pottering about the corral, and Luis, a boy about
eighteen years old, was fooling with a colt in a small enclosure that had
evidently been intended for a garden and had been permitted to grow up in
weeds and grass instead.
After a while a peona came out and fed the chickens, and hunted through
the sheds for eggs, which she carried in her apron. She stopped to watch
Luis and the colt, and Luis coaxed her to give him an egg, which he was
feeding to the colt when his mother saw and called to him shrilly from
the house. The peona ducked guiltily and ran, stooping, beside a stone
wall that hid her from sight until she had slipped into the kitchen. The
señora searched for her, scolding volubly in high-keyed Mexican, so that
Estan came lounging up to see what was the matter.
Afterwards they all went to the house, and Starr knew that there would be
real, Mexican tortillas crisp and hot from the baking, and chili con
carne and beans, and perhaps another savory dish or two which the señora
herself had prepared for her sons.
Starr was hungry. He imagined that he could smell those tortillas from
where he lay. He could have gone down, and the Medinas would have greeted
him with lavish welcome and would have urged him to eat his fill. They
would not question him, he knew. If they suspected his mission, they
would cover their suspicion with much amiable talk, and their
protestations of welcome would be the greater because of their
insincerity. But he did not go down. He made himself more comfortable
between the boulders and settled himself to wait and see what the night
would bring.
First it brought the gorgeous sunset, that made him think of Helen May
just because it was beautiful and because she would probably be gazing up
at the crimson and gold and all the other elusive, swift-changing shades
that go to make a barbaric sunset. Sure, she would be looking at it,
unless she was still talking to that man, he thought jealously. It
fretted him that he did not know who the fellow was. So he turned his
thoughts away from the two of them.
Next came the dusk, and after that the stars. There was no moon to taunt
him with memories, or more practically, to light for him the near
country. With the stars came voices from the porch of the adobe house
below him. Estan's voice he made out easily, calling out to Luis inside,
to ask if he had shut the colt in the corral. The señora's high voice
spoke swiftly, admonishing Luis. And presently Luis could be seen dimly
as he moved down toward the corrals.
Starr hated this spying upon a home, but he held himself doggedly to the
task. Too many homes were involved, too many sons were in danger, too
many mothers would mourn if he did not play the spy to some purpose now.
This very home he was watching would be the happier when he and his
fellows had completed their work and the snake of intrigue was beheaded
just as Helen May had beheaded the rattler that afternoon. This home was
happy now, under the very conditions that were being deplored so
bombastically in the circulars he had read. Why, then, should its peace
be despoiled because of political agitators?
Luis put the colt up for the night and returned, whistling, to the house.
The tune he whistled was one he had learned at some movie show, and in a
minute he broke into singing, "Hearts seem light, and life seems bright
in dreamy Chinatown." Starr, brooding up there above the boy, wished that
Luis might never be heavier of heart than now, when he went singing up
the path to the thick-walled adobe. He liked Luis.
The murmur of voices continued, and after awhile there came plaintively
up to Starr the sound of a guitar, and mingling with it the voice of Luis
singing a Spanish song. _La Golondrina_, it was, that melancholy song of
exile which Mexicans so love. Starr listened gloomily, following the
words easily enough in that still night air.
Away to the northwest there gleamed a brighter, more intimate star than
the constellation above. While Luis sang, the watcher in the rocks fixed
his eyes wistfully on that gleaming pin point of light, and wondered what
Helen May was doing. Her lighted window it was; her window that looked
down through the mouth of the Basin and out over the broken mesa land
that was half desert. Until then he had not known that her window saw so
far; though it was not strange that he could see her light, since he was
on the crest of a ridge higher than any other until one reached the bluff
that held Sunlight Basin like a pocket within its folds.
Luis finished the song, strummed a while, sang a popular rag-time,
strummed again and, so Starr explained his silence, went to bed. Estan
began again to talk, now and then lifting his voice, speaking earnestly,
as though he was arguing or protesting, or perhaps expounding a theory of
some sort. Starr could not catch the words, though he knew in a general
way the meaning of the tones Estan was using.
A new sound brought him to his knees, listening: the sound of a
high-powered engine being thrown into low gear and buzzing like angry
hornets because the wheels did not at once grip and thrust the car
forward. Sand would do that. While Starr listened, he heard the chuckle
of the car getting under way, and a subdued purring so faint that, had
there not been a slow, quiet breeze from that direction, the sound would
never have reached his ears at all. Even so, he had no more than
identified it when the silence flowed in and covered it as a lazy tide
covers a pebble in the moist sand.
Starr glanced down at the house, heard Estan still talking, and got
carefully to his feet. He thought he knew where the car had slipped in
the sand, and he made toward the place as quickly as he could go in the
dark and still keep his movements quiet. It was back in that arroyo where
he had first discovered traces of the car he now felt sure had come from
the yard of _Las Nuevas_.
He remembered that on the side next him the arroyo had deep-cut banks
that might get him a nasty fall if he attempted them in the dark, so he
took a little more time for the trip and kept to the rougher, yet safer,
granite-covered ridge. Once, just once, he caught the glow of dimmed
headlights falling on the slope farthest from him. He hurried faster,
after that, and so he climbed down into the arroyo at last, near the
point where he had climbed out of it that other day.
He went, as straight as he could go in the dark, to the place where he
had first seen the tracks of the Silvertown cords. He listened, straining
his ears to catch the smallest sound. A cricket fiddled stridently, but
there was nothing else.
Starr took a chance and searched the ground with a pocket flashlight. He
did not find any fresh tracks, however. And while he was standing in the
dark considering how the hills might have carried the sound deceptively
to his ear, and how he may have been mistaken, from somewhere on the
other side of the ridge came the abrupt report of a gun. The sound was
muffled by the distance, yet it was unmistakable. Starr listened, heard
no second shot, and ran back up the rocky gulch that led to the ridge he
had just left, behind Medina's house.
He was puffing when he reached the place where he had lain between the
two boulders, and he stopped there to listen again. It came,--the sound
he instinctively expected, yet dreaded to hear; the sound of a woman's
high-keyed wailing.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
"IS HE THEN DEAD--MY SON?"
Starr hurried down the bluff, slipping, sliding, running where the way
was clear of rocks. So presently he came to the stone wall, vaulted over
it, and stopped beside the tragic little group dimly outlined in the
house yard just off the porch.
"My son--my son!" the old woman was wailing, on her knees beside a long,
inert figure lying on its back on the hard-packed earth. Back of her the
peona hovered, hysterical, useless. Luis, half dressed and a good deal
dazed yet from sleep and the suddenness of his waking, knelt beside his
mother, patting her shoulder in futile affection, staring down
bewilderedly at Estan.
So Starr found them. Scenes like this were not so unusual in his life,
which had been lived largely among unruly passions. He spoke quietly to
Luis and knelt to see if the man lived. The señora took comfort from his
calm presence and with dumb misery watched his deft movements while he
felt for heartbeats and for the wound.
"But is he then dead, my son?" she wailed in Spanish, when Starr gently
laid down upon Estan's breast the hand he had been holding. "But so
little while ago he lived and to me he talked. Ah, my son!"
Starr looked at her quietingly. "How, then, did it happen? Tell me,
señora, that I may assist," he said, speaking easily the Spanish which
she spoke.
"Ah, the good friend that thou art! Ah, my son that I loved! How can I
tell what is mystery? Who would harm my son--my little Estan that was so
good? Yet a voice called softly from the dark--and me, I heard, though to
my bed I had but gone. 'Estan!' called the voice, so low. And my son--ah,
my son!--to the door he went swiftly, the _lampara_ in his hand, holding
it high--so--that the light may shine into the dark.
"'Who calls?' Me, I heard my son ask--ah, never again will I hear his
voice! Out of the door he went--to see the man who called. To the
porch-end he came--I heard his steps. Ah, my son! Never again thy dear
footsteps will I hear!" And she fell to weeping over him.
"And then? Tell me, señora. What happened next?"
"Ah--the shot that took from me my son! Then feet running away--then I
came out--Ah, _querido mio_, that thou shouldst be torn from thy
mother thus!"
"And you don't know--?"
"No, no--no--ah, that my heart should break with sorrow--"
"Hush, mother! 'Twas Apodaca! He is powerful--and Estan would not come
into the Alliance. I told him it would be--" Luis, kneeling there,
beating his hands together in the dark, spoke with the heedless
passion of youth.
"Which Apodaca? Juan?" Starr's voice was low, with the sympathetic tone
that pulls open the floodgates of speech when one is stricken hard.
"Not Juan; Juan is a fool. Elfigo Apodaca it was--or some one obeying his
order. Estan they feared--Estan would not come in, and the time was
coming so close--and Estan held out and talked against it. I told him his
life would pay for his holding out. I _told_ him! And now I shall kill
Apodaca--and my life also will pay--"
"What is this thou sayest?" The mother, roused from her lamentations by
the boy's vehemence, plucked at his sleeve. "But thou must not kill, my
little son. Thou art--"
"Why not? They'll all be killing in a month!" flashed Luis unguardedly.
Starr, kneeling on one knee, looked at the boy across Estan's chilling
body. A guarded glance it was, but a searching glance that questioned and
weighed and sat in judgment upon the truth of the startling assertion.
Yet younger boys than Luis are commanding troops in Mexico, for the
warlike spirit develops early in a land where war is the chief business
of the populace. It was not strange then that eighteen-year-old Luis
should be actively interested in the building of a revolution on this
side the border. It was less strange because of his youth; for Luis would
have all the fiery attributes of the warrior, unhindered by the cool
judgment of maturity. He would see the excitement, the glory of it. Estan
would see the terrible cost of it, in lives and in patrimony. Luis loved
action. Estan loved his big flocks and his acres upon acres of land, and
his quiet home; had loved too his foster country, if he had spoken his
true sentiments. So Starr took his cue and thanked his good fortune that
he had come upon this tragedy while it was fresh, and while the shock of
it was loosening the tongue of Luis.
"A month from now is another time, Luis," he said quietly. "This is
murder, and the man who did it can be punished."
"You can't puneesh Apodaca," Luis retorted, speaking English, since Starr
had used the language, which put their talk beyond the mother's
understanding. "He is too--too high up--But I can kill," he added
vindictively.
"The law can get him better than you can," Starr pointed out cannily.
"Can you think of anybody else that might be in on the deal?"
"N-o--" Luis was plainly getting a hold on himself, and would not tell
all he knew. "I don't know notheeng about it."
"Well, what you'd better do now is saddle a horse and ride in to town and
tell the coroner--and the sheriff. If you don't," he added, when he
caught a stiffening of opposition in the attitude of Luis, "if you don't,
you will find yourself in all kinds of trouble. It will look bad. You
have to notify the coroner, anyway, you know. That's the law. And the
coroner will see right away that Estan was shot. So the sheriff will be
bound to get on the job, and it will be a heap better for you, Luis, if
you tell him yourself. And if you try to kill Apodaca, that will rob your
mother of both her sons. You must think of her. Estan would never bring
trouble to her that way. You stand in his place now. So you ride in and
tell the sheriff and tell the coroner. Say that you suspect Elfigo
Apodaca. The sheriff will do the rest."
"What does the señor advise, my son?" murmured the mother, plucking at
the sleeve of Luis. "The good friend he was to my poor Estan--my son! Do
thou what he tells thee, for he is wise and good, and he would not guide
thee wrong."
Luis hesitated, staring down at the dead body of Estan. "I will go," he
said, breaking in upon the sound of the peona's reasonless weeping. "I
will do that. The sheriff is not Mexican, or--" He checked himself
abruptly and peered across at Starr. "I go," he repeated hastily.
He stood up, and Starr rose also and assisted the old lady to her feet.
She seemed inclined to cling to him. Her Estan had liked Starr, and for
that her faith in him never faltered now. He laid his arm protectively
around her shaking shoulders.
"Señora, go you in and rest," he commanded gently, in Spanish. "Have the
girl bring a blanket to cover Estan--for here he must remain until he is
viewed by the coroner--you understand? Your son would be grieved if you
do not rest. You still have Luis, your little son. You must be brave and
help Luis to be a man. Then will Estan be proud of you both." So he
suited his speech to the gentle ways of the old señora, and led her back
to the shelter of the porch as tenderly as Estan could have done.
He sent the peona for a lamp to replace the one that had broken when
Estan fell with it in his hand. He settled the señora upon the
cowhide-covered couch where her frail body could be comfortable and she
still could feel that she was watching beside her son. He placed a pillow
under her head, and spread a gay-striped serape over her, and tucked it
carefully around her slippered feet. The señora wept more quietly, and
called him the son of her heart, and brokenly thanked God for the
tenderness of all good men.
He explained to her briefly that he had been riding to town by a
short-cut over the ridge when he heard the shot and hurried down; and
that, having left his horse up there, he must go up after it and bring it
around to the corral. He would not be gone longer than was absolutely
necessary, he told her, and he promised to come back and stay with her
while the officers were there. Then he hurried away, the señora's broken
thanks lingering painfully in his memory.
At the top of the bluff, where he had climbed as fast as he could, he
stood for a minute to get his breath back. He heard the muffled
pluckety-pluck of a horse galloping down the sandy trail, and he knew
that there went Luis on his bitter mission to San Bonito. His eyes turned
involuntarily toward Sunlight Basin. There twinkled still the light from
Helen May's window, though it was well past midnight. Starr wondered at
that, and hoped she was not sick. Then immediately his face grew
lowering. For between him and the clear, twinkling light of her window he
saw a faint glow that moved swiftly across the darkness; an automobile
running that way with dimmed headlights.
"Now what in thunder does that mean?" he asked himself uneasily. He had
not in the least expected that move. He had believed that the automobile
he had heard, which very likely had carried the murderer, would hurry
straight to town, or at least in that direction. But those dimmed lights,
and in that the machine surely betrayed a furtiveness in its flight,
seemed to be heading for Sunlight Basin, though it might merely be making
the big loop on its way to Malpais or beyond. He stared again at the
twinkling light of Helen May's lamp. What in the world was she doing up
at that hour of the night? "Oh, well, maybe she sleeps with a light
burning." He dismissed the unusual incident, and went on about his more
urgent business.
Rabbit greeted him with a subdued nicker of relief, telling plainly as a
horse can speak that he had been seriously considering foraging for his
supper and not waiting any longer for Starr. There he had stood for six
or seven hours, just where Starr had dismounted and dropped the reins. He
was a patient little horse, and he knew his business, but there is a
limit to patience, and Rabbit had almost reached it.
Starr led him up over the rocky ridge into the arroyo where the
automobile had been, and from there he rode down to the trail and back to
the Medina ranch. He watered Rabbit at the ditch, pulled off the saddle,
and turned him into the corral, throwing him an armful of secate from a
half-used stack. Then he went up to the house and sat on the edge of the
porch beside the señora, who was still weeping and murmuring yearning
endearments to the ears that could not hear.
He did not know how long he would have to wait, but he knew that Luis
would not spare his horse. He smoked, and studied the things which Luis
had let drop; every word of immense value to him now. Elfigo Apodaca he
knew slightly, and he wondered a little that he would be the Alliance
leader in this section of the State.
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.
The sheriff chewed and teetered meditatively, his eyes on the ground.
From the tail of his eye Starr watched him, secretly willing to bet that
he knew what the sheriff was thinking. When O'Malley turned and strolled
back to the porch, his hands still in his pockets and his eyes still on
the ground as though he were weighing the matter carefully, Starr stood
where he was, apparently unaware that the sheriff had moved. Starr seemed
to be watching the coroner curiously, but he knew just when the sheriff
passed cat-footedly behind him, and he grinned to himself.
The sheriff made one of his sudden moves, and jerked the six-shooter from
its holster at Starr's hip, pulled out the cylinder pin and released the
cylinder with its customary five loaded chambers and an empty one under
the hammer. He tilted the gun, muzzle to him, toward the rising sun and
squinted into its barrel that shone with the care it got, save where
particles of dust had lodged in the bore. He held the gun close under his
red nose and sniffed for the smell of oil that would betray a fresh
cleaning. And Starr watched him interestedly, smiling approval.
"All right, far as you've gone," he said casually, when the sheriff was
replacing the cylinder in the gun. "If you want to go a step farther, I
reckon maybe I can show you where I come down off the bluff when I
heard the shot, and where I went back again after my horse. And you'll
see, maybe, that I couldn't shoot from the bluff and get a man around
on the far side of the house. Won't take but a minute to show yuh." He
gave the slight head tilt and the slight wink of one eye which, the
world over, asks for a secret conference, and started off around the
corner of the house.