Starr, of the Desert by B. M. Bower (most inspirational books txt) 📖

conversation to the point of making her adieu. Starr did not watch long enough for his own peace of mind. Five more minutes would have brought the plump one into plain view with her brother and Helen May, and would have identified Holman Sommers as the escort of a lady caller. But those five minutes Starr spent in crawling back down the peak on the side farthest from the Basin, leaving Holman Sommers sticking in his mind with the unpleasant flavor of mystery.

He mounted Rabbit again and made a detour of several miles so that he might come up on the ridge behind Medina's without running any risk of crossing the trail of the men he wanted to watch. About two o'clock he stopped at a shallow, brackish stream and let Rabbit rest and feed for an hour while Starr himself climbed another rocky pinnacle and scanned the country between there and Medina's.

The gate that let one off the main road and into the winding trail which led to the house stood out in plain view at the mouth of a shallow draw. This was not the trail which led out from the home ranch toward San Bonito, where Starr had been going when he saw the track of the mysterious automobile, but the trail one would take in going from Medina's to Malpais. The ranch house itself stood back where the draw narrowed, but the yellow-brown trail ribboned back from the gate in plain view.

Here again Starr was fated to get a glimpse and no more. He focussed his glasses on the main road first; picked up the Medina branch to the gate, followed the trail on up the draw, and again he picked up a man riding a bay horse. And just as he was adjusting his lenses for a sharper clarity of vision, the horse trotted around a bend and disappeared from sight.

Starr swore, but that did not bring the man back down the trail. Starr was not at all sure that this was the same man he had seen in the draw, and he was not sure that either was the man who had shot at him. But roosting on that heat-blistered pinnacle swearing about the things he didn't know struck him as a profitless performance, so he climbed down, got into the saddle again, and rode on.

He reached the granite ridge back of Medina's about four o'clock in the afternoon. He was tired, for he had been going since daylight, and for a part of the time at least he had been going on foot, climbing the steep, rocky sides of peaks for the sake of what he might see from the top, and then climbing down again for sake of what some one else might see if he stayed too long. His high-heeled riding boots that Helen May so greatly admired were very good-looking and very comfortable when he had them stuck into stirrups to the heel. But they had never been built for walking. Therefore his feet ached abominably. And there was the heat, the searing, dry heat of midsummer in the desert country. He was dog tired, and he was depressed because he had not seemed able to accomplish anything with all his riding and all his scanning of the country.

He climbed slowly the last, brown granite ridge, the ridge behind Estan Medina's house. He would watch the place and see what was going on there. Then, he supposed he should go back and watch Las Nuevas, though his chief seemed to think that he had discovered enough there for their purposes. He had sent on the pamphlets, and he knew that when the time was right, Las Nuevas would be muzzled with a postal law and, he hazarded, a seizure of their mail.

What he had to do now was to find the men who were working in conjunction with Las Nuevas; who were taking the active part in organizing and in controlling the Mexican Alliance. So far he had not hit upon the real leaders, and he knew it, and in his weariness was oppressed with a sense of failure. They might better have left him in Texas, he told himself glumly. They sure had drawn a blank when they drew him into the Secret Service, because he had accomplished about as much as a pup trying to run down a coyote.

A lizard scuttled out of his way, when he crawled between two boulders that would shield him from sight unless a man walked right up on him where he lay—and Starr did not fear that, because there were too many loose cobbles to roll and rattle; he knew, because he had been twice as long as he liked in getting to this point quietly. He took off his hat, telling himself morosely that you couldn't tell his head from a lump of granite anyway, when he had his hat off, and lifted his glasses to his aching eyes.

The Medina ranch was just showing signs of awakening after a siesta. 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