the car. His uniform tightened as he swelled with the importance of his
mission. He nodded to Sheriff O'Malley and the chief of police, cast an
obliquely curious glance at Starr, who stayed on the ground, and when
Starr gave the word he swung his lantern to the watching fireman, and
caught the handrail beside the steps.
"Fort Bliss it is; and there won't nothing stop us, buh-lieve me!" he
muttered confidentially to Starr, whom he recognized only as the man who
stood behind the mystery. The engine began to creep forward, and he swung
up to the lower step. "We may go in the ditch or something; but we'll get
there, you listen to me!"
"Go to it, and good luck," said Starr, but there was no heartiness in his
voice. He stood with his thumbs hooked inside his gun-belt and watched
the coach that held the peace of the country within its varnished walls
go sliding out of the yard, its green tail lights the only illumination
anywhere behind the engine. When it had clicked over the switch and was
picking up speed for its careening flight south through the cool hours of
early morning, he gave a sigh that had no triumph in it, and turned away
toward his cabin.
"Well, there goes the revolution," he said somberly to himself. "And here
I go to do the rest of the job; and alongside what I've got to do, hell
would be a picnic!"
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
STARR TAKES ANOTHER PRISONER
With a slip of paper in his pocket that would have gone a long way toward
clearing Helen May, had he only taken the trouble to look at it, Starr
rode out in the cool early morning to Sunlight Basin. He looked white and
worn, and his eyes were sunken and circled with the purple of too little
sleep and too much worry, for in the three days since he had seen her,
Starr had not been able to forget his misery once in merciful sleep. Only
when he was busy with capturing the Junta had he lost for a time the keen
pain of his hurt.
Now it was back like an aching tooth set going again with cold water or
sweets. He tried to make himself think that he hated Helen May, and that
a girl of that type--a girl who could lend herself to such
treachery--could not possibly win from him anything but a pitying
contempt. He told himself over and over again that he was merely sore
because a girl had "put something over on him"; that a man hated to have
a woman make a fool of him.
He tried to gloat over the fact that he had found her out before she had
any inkling of how he felt toward her; he actually believed that! He
tried not to wince at the thought of her at Fort Bliss, a Federal
prisoner, charged with conspiring against the government. She must have
known the risk she took, he kept telling himself. The girl was no fool,
was way above the average in intelligence. That was why she had appealed
to him; he had felt the force of her personality, the underlying strength
of her character that had not harshened her outward charm, as strength so
often does for a woman.
That was the worst of it. Had she been weak she would never have mixed
with any political conspiracy; they would not have wanted her, for
intrigue has no place for weaklings. But had she been weak she would
never have attracted Starr so deeply, however innocent she might have
been. So his reasoning went round and round in a circle, until he was
utterly heartsick with no hope of finding peace.
There was one thing he could do: it would be tightening the screws of his
torture, but he meant to do it for her sake. He would take her to Fort
Bliss himself, shielding her from publicity and humiliation; and he would
take charge of Vic, and see that the kid did not suffer too much on
account of his sister.
He would make a man of Vic; he never guessed that he was taking up
mentally the burden which Peter had laid upon Helen May. He believed
there was good stuff in that kid, and with the right handling he would
come out all right. He would put in a plea to his chief for leniency
toward the girl too. He would say that she was young and inexperienced
and that Holman Sommers had probably drawn her into his scheme--Starr
could see how that might easily be--and that her health was absolutely
dependent upon open air. They couldn't keep her shut up long; a girl
could not do much harm, if the rest of the bunch was convicted. Maybe
the lesson and the scare would be all she needed to pull her back into
lawful living. She was not a hardened adventuress; why, she couldn't be
much over twenty-one or two! After a while, when she had straightened
up, maybe ...
So Starr thought and thought, fighting to keep a little hope alive, to
see a little gleam of light in the blackness of his soul. His head bent,
his eyes staring unseeingly at the yellow-brown dust of the trail, he
rode along unconscious of everything save the battle raging fiercely
within. He did not know what pace Rabbit was taking; he even forgot that
he was on Rabbit's back. He did not know that his duty as a man and his
man's love were fighting the fiercest battle of his life, or if he did,
he never thought to call it a battle.
There had been one black night in the cabin--the night before this last
one, it was--when he had considered for a while how he might smuggle
Helen May out of the country, suppressing the fact of her complicity. He
planned just how he could put her on a train and "shoot her to Los
Angeles," as he worded it to himself. How she could take a boat there for
Vancouver, and how he could hold back developments here until he knew she
was safe. He figured the approximate cost and the hole it would make in
his little savings account. He thought of everything, even to marrying
her before she left, so that he could not be compelled to testify against
her, in case she was caught.
He had dozed afterwards, and had dreamed that he put his plan to the test
of reality. He had married Helen May and taken her himself to Los
Angeles. But there had not been money enough for him to go any farther,
and his chief had wired him peremptorily to return and arrest the leaders
of the Alliance and all connected with it. So he had bought a steerage
ticket for Helen May and put her aboard the boat, where she must herd
with a lot of leering Chinamen. He had stood on the pier and watched the
boat swing out and nose its way to the open sea, and a submarine had
torpedoed it when it had sailed beyond the three-mile limit off the
coast, so he could not go after her. He was just taking off his coat to
try it, anyway, when he awoke.
That was all the good his sleep had done him: set him upright in bed with
a cold sweat on his face and his hands shaking. But the reaction from
that nightmare had been complete, and Starr had not again planned how he
might dodge his plain duty. But he kept thinking around and around the
subject for all that, as though he could not give up entirely the hope of
being able to save her somehow.
He did not know, until he passed the corral, that he was already in
Sunlight Basin, and that the house stood just up the slope before him.
Rabbit must have taken it for granted that Starr was bound for this place
and so had kept the trail of his own accord, for Starr could not remember
turning from the main road. He did not even know that he had passed not
more than a hundred yards from Vic and the goats, and that Vic had
shouted "hello" to him.
He took a long breath when he glanced up and saw the house so close, but
he did not attempt to dodge or even delay the final tragedy of his
mission. He let Rabbit keep straight on. And when the horse stopped
before the closed front door, Starr slid off and walked, like a tired old
man, to the door and knocked.
Helen May had been washing the breakfast dishes, and Starr heard the
muffled sound of her high-heeled slippers clicking over the bare floor
for a minute before she came into the front room and opened the door. She
had a dish towel over her right arm, opening the door with her left.
Starr knew that the dish towel was merely a covering for her six-shooter,
and his heart hardened a little at that fresh reminder of her
preparedness and her guile.
"Why, good morning, desert man," she said brightly, after the first
little start of surprise. "Come on in. The coffee's fine this morning;
and I just had a hunch I'd better not throw it out for a while yet.
There's a little waffle batter left, too."
Starr had choked down a cup of coffee and a sandwich at the station lunch
counter before he left San Bonito, and he was glad now that he was not
hungry. He stepped inside, but he did not smile back at Helen May; nor
could he have accepted her hospitality to save himself from starvation.
He felt enough like Judas as it was.
"Don't put down your gun yet," he said abruptly, standing beside the door
with his hat in his hand, as though his visit would be very short. "You
can shoot me if you want to, but that's about all the leeway I can give
you. I rounded up the revolution leaders last night. They're likely at
Fort Bliss by now, so you can take your choice between handing me a
bullet, or going along with me to Fort Bliss. Because if I live, that's
where I'll have to take you. And," he added as an afterthought, "I don't
care much which it is."
Helen May stood with her chin tilted down, and stared at him from under
her eyebrows. She did not speak for a minute, and Starr leaned back
against the closed door with his arms folded negligently and his hat
dangling from one hand, waiting her decision. He stared back at her,
somberly apathetic. He had spoken the simple truth when he said he did
not care which she decided to do. He had come to the limit of suffering,
it seemed to him. He could look into her tawny brown eyes now without any
emotion whatever.
"You don't smell drunk," said Helen May suddenly and very bluntly, "and
you don't look crazy. What is the matter with you, Starr of the desert?
Is this a joke, or what?"
"It didn't strike me as any joke," Starr told her passionlessly.
"Thirteen of them I rounded up. Holman Sommers was the head of the whole
thing. Elfigo Apodaca is in jail, held for the shooting of Estan Medina.
Luis Medina is in jail too, held as a witness and to keep Apodaca's men
from killing him before he can testify in court. I hated to see the kid
tangled up with it--and I hate to see you in it. But that don't give me
any license to let you off. You're under arrest. I'm a Secret Service
man, sent here to prevent the revolution that's been brewing all spring
and summer. I guess I've done it, all right." He stared at her with
growing bitterness in his eyes. His hurt began dully to ache again.
"Helen May, what in God's name did you tangle up with 'em for?" he
flashed in a sudden passion of grief and reproach.
Helen May's chin squared a little; but she who had not screamed when she
found her father dead in his bed; she who had read his letter without
whimpering held her voice quiet now, though womanlike she answered
Starr's question with another.
"What makes you think I am tangled up with it? What reason have you got
for connecting me with such a thing?"
A stain of anger reddened Starr's cheek bones, that had been pale. "What
reason? Well, I'll tell you. In the office of _Las Nuevas_, in that
little, inside room with the door opening out of a closet to hide it,
where I got my first real clue, I found two sheets of paper with some
strong revolutionary stuff written in English. Also I found a pamphlet
where the same stuff had been printed in Spanish. I kept that writing,
and I kept the pamphlet. I've got it now. I'd know the writing anywhere
I saw it, and I saw a sample of it here in this very room, when the wind
blew those papers off your desk."
"You--in this room!" Helen May caught her breath. "Why--why, you couldn't
have! I never wrote any revolution stuff in my life! Why--I don't know
the first thing about _Las Nuevas_, as you call it. How could my
writing--?" She caught her breath again, for she remembered.
"Why, Starr of the desert, that was Holman Sommers' writing you saw! I
remember now. Some pages of his manuscript blew off the desk when you
were here. See, I can show you a whole pile of it!" She ran to the desk,
Starr following her mechanically. "See? All kinds of scientific junk that
he wanted typed. Isn't that the writing you meant? Isn't it?" Her hands
trembled so that the papers she held close to Starr's face shook, but
Starr recognized the same symmetrical, hard-to-read chirography.
"Yes, that's it." His voice was so husky that she could hardly hear him.
He moistened his lips, that had gone dry. Was it possible? His mind kept
asking over and over.
"And here! I don't ask you to take my word for it--I know that just those
pages don't prove anything, because I might have written that stuff
myself--if I knew enough! But here's a lot that he sent over by the
stage driver yesterday. I haven't even opened it yet. You can see the
same handwriting in the address, can't you? And if he has written a
note--he does sometimes--and signed it--he always signs his name in
full--why, that will be proof, won't it?" Her eyes burned into his and
steadied a little his whirling thoughts.
"Open it, desert man! Open it, and see if there's a note! And you can ask
the stage driver, if you don't believe me; here, break the string!"
She was now more eager than he to see what was inside the wrapping of
newspaper. "See? That's an El Paso paper--and I don't take anything but
the _Times_ from Los Angeles! Oh, goody! There is a note! You read it,
Starr. Read it out loud. If that doesn't convince you, why--why I can
prove by Vic--"
Starr had unfolded the sheet of tablet paper, and Helen May interrupted
herself to listen. Starr's voice was uneven, husky when he tried to
control the quiver in it. And this he read, in the handwriting of which
he had such bitter knowledge:
"My Dear Miss Stevenson:
"I am enclosing herewith a part of Chapter Two, which I have revised
considerably and beg you to retype for me. If you have no asterisk sign
upon your machine, will you be so kind as to make use of the period sign
to indicate a break in the context of the quotations from the various
authors whom I have cited?
"I wish to inform you that I am deeply sorry to place this extra burden
of work upon you, and also assure you that I am more than delighted with
the care you have exercised in deciphering correctly my most abominable
chirography.
"May I also suggest, with all due respect to your intelligence and with a
keen appreciation of the potent influences of youth and romance upon even
the drudgery of an amanuensis, that in writing "stars of the universe" in
a scientific document, the connotation is marred somewhat when stars is
spelled "Starr's."
"Very apologetically your friend,
"HOLMAN SOMMERS."
It took several seconds for the full significance of that last
paragraph to sink into minds so absorbed with another matter. But when
it did sink in--
"Oh-h!" gasped Helen May, and backed a step, her face the color of a red
hollyhock.
Starr looked up from reading those pregnant words a second time to
himself. He reached out and caught Helen May by her two shoulders.
"Did you do that?" he whispered impellingly. "Did you spell my name into
that man's manuscript?"
"No, I didn't! I don't believe I did--I never noticed--well, even if I
did, that doesn't mean--anything." I hope the printers will set that
_anything_ in their very smallest type, just to show you how weak and
futile and scarcely audible and absolutely unconvincing the word sounded.
For one reason, Helen May did not have much breath to say it with; and
for another reason, she knew there was not much use in saying it.
* * * * *
Helen May, sitting unabashed on Starr's lap, with an arm around his
neck and her head on his shoulder, with her dish towel and gun lying
just where she had dropped them on the floor some time before, took
Peter's last letter from Starr's fingers and drew it tenderly down
along her cheek.
"I only wish you could have known dad," she said with a gentle melancholy
that was a great deal lightened by her present happiness. "He wasn't at
all striking on the surface; he was so quiet and so unassuming. But he
was just the dearest and the bravest man--and when I think what he did
for me..."
"I know he was dear and brave; I can judge by his daughter." Starr
reached up and prisoned hand and letter together and held them against
his lips. "Seems like a nightmare now that I ever thought--And to think I
headed out here to..."
"Well, I _am_ your prisoner." Helen May answered that part of the
sentence which Starr had left unspoken. "Listen, desert man o' mine.
I--I want to be your prisoner forever and ever and ever!"
"You won't get anything less than a life sentence, lady! And--"
"Hully gosh!" Vic, bursting open the door just in the middle of a kiss,
skidded precipitately through to the kitchen. "Fade out!" he advised
himself as he went. "But say! When you get around to it, I'd like
something to eat, Helen Blazes!"
THE END