Starr, of the Desert Part 19

"You have got to show me where you're any better _acting_," Vic pointed out, with the merciless candor of beauty's young brother. "It sure ain't your disposition that's improved, I can tell you those."

"And with those few remarks you can close," Helen May retorted gleefully, hurrying off to get the headache tablet. It was just a headache, poor fellow! He wasn't peeved at all, and nothing was wrong!

It was astonishing how her mood had lightened in the past two minutes.

She got him a gla.s.s of water to help the tablet down his throat, and stood close beside him while he swallowed it and thanked her, and began to make some show of eating his breakfast. She was, in fact, the same whimsically charming Helen May he had come to care a great deal for.

That made things harder than ever for Starr. If the tablet had been prescribed for heartache rather than headache, Starr would have swallowed thankfully the dose. The murder, over against the other line of hills, had not seemed to him so terrible as those sheets of scribbled paper locked away inside Helen May's desk. The grief of Estan's mother over her dead son was no more bitter than was Starr's grief at what he believed was true of Helen May. Indeed, Starr's trouble was greater, because he must mask it with a smile.

All through breakfast he talked with her, looked into her eyes, smiled at her across the table. But he was white under his tan. She thought that was from his headache, and was kinder than she meant to be because of it; perhaps because of her dream too, though she was not conscious of any change in her manner.

Starr could have cursed her for that change, which he believed was a sly attempt to win him over and make him forget anything he may have read on those pages. He would not think of it then; time enough when he was away and need not pretend or set a guard over his features and his tongue. The hurt was there, the great, incredible, soul-searing hurt; but he would not dwell upon what had caused that hurt. He forced himself to talk and to laugh now and then, but afterwards he could not remember what they had talked about.

As soon as he decently could, he went away again into the howling wind that had done him so ill a turn. He did not know what he should do; this discovery that Helen May was implicated had set him all at sea, but he felt that he must get away somewhere and think the whole thing out before he went crazy.

He left the Basin, rode around behind it and, leaving Rabbit in the thicket where he had left him the day before, he toiled up the pinnacle and sat down in the shelter of a boulder pile where he would be out of the wind as well as out of sight, and where he could still stare somberly down at the cabin.

And there he faced his trouble bravely, and at the same time he fulfilled his duty toward his government by keeping a watch over the place that seemed to him then the most suspicious place in the country.

The office of _Las Nuevas_, even, was not more so, as Starr saw things then. For if _Las Nuevas_ were the distributing point for the propaganda literature, this cabin of Helen May's seemed to be the fountain head.

First of all, and going back to the beginning, how did he really _know_ that her story was true? How, for instance, did he know that her father had not been one of the heads of the conspiracy? How did he know that her father--it might even be her husband!--was dead? He had simply accepted her word, as a matter of course, because she was a young woman, and more attractive than the average young woman. Starr was terribly bitter, at that point in his reasoning, and even felt certain that he hated all women. Well, then, her reason for being in the neighborhood would bear a lot of looking into.

Then there was that automobile that had pa.s.sed where he had found her and her goats, that evening. Was it plausible, he asked himself, that she had actually walked over there? The machine had returned along the same trail, running by moonlight with its lights out. Might it not have been coming to pick her up? Only he had happened along, and she had let him walk home with her, probably to keep him where she could watch him!

There was that shot at him from the pinnacle behind her cabin. There was her evident familiarity with firearms, though she professed not to own a gun. There was the man who had been down there with her, not more than an hour after he had left her with a bullet burn across his arm. Starr saw now how that close conversation might easily have been a conference between her and the man who had shot at him.

There was the light in her window at one o'clock in the morning, and the machine with dimmed headlights making toward her place. There was her evident caution against undesirable callers, her coming to the door with a six-shooter hidden against her skirt. There was that handwriting, to which Starr would unhesitatingly have sworn as being the same as on the pages he had found in the office of _Las Nuevas_. The writing was unmistakable: fine, even, symmetrical as print, yet hard to decipher; slanting a little to the left instead of the right. He had studied too often the pages in his pocket not to recognize it at a glance.

Most d.a.m.ning evidence of all the evidence against her were two or three words which his eyes had picked from the context on the page uppermost in his hand. He had become familiar with those words, written in that peculiar chirography. "Justice... submission ... ruling ..." He had caught them at a glance, though he did not know how they were connected, or what relation they bore to the general theme. Political bunk, his mind tagged it therefore, and had no doubt whatever that he was right.

"She's got brown eyes and blond hair, and that looks like mixed blood,"

he reminded himself suddenly, after he had sat for a long while staring down at the house. "How do I know her folks aren't Spanish or something?

How do I know anything about her? I just swallowed what she handed out--like a d.a.m.n' fool!"

Just after noon, when the wind had shown some sign of dying down to a more reasonable blow, Helen May came forth in her riding skirt and a Tam o' Shanter cap and a sweater, with a package under her arm--a package of ma.n.u.script which she had worked late to finish and was now going to deliver.

She got the pinto pony which Vic had just ridden sulkily down to the corral and left for her, and she rode away down the trail, jolting a good deal in the saddle when the pinto trotted a few steps, but apparently well pleased with herself.

Starr watched until she turned into the main trail that led toward San Bonito. Then, when he was reasonably sure of the direction she meant to take, he hurried down to where Rabbit waited, mounted that long-suffering animal and followed, using short cuts and deep washes that would hide him from sight, but keeping Helen May in view most of the time for all that.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

HOLMAN SOMMERS TURNS PROPHET

Holman Sommers, clad outwardly in old wool trousers of a dingy gray, a faded brown smoking jacket that had shrunk in many washings until it was three inches too short in the sleeves, and old brown slippers, sat tilted back in a kitchen chair against the wall of his house and smoked a beautifully colored meerschaum with solid gold bands and a fine amber mouthpiece, while he conferred comfortably with one Elfigo Apodaca.

There was no quizzical twinkle in the eyes of Holman Sommers, vividly alive though they were always. With his low slipper heels hooked over the rung of his chair and his right hand nursing the bowl of his pipe and his black hair rumpled in the wind, he was staring at the granite ridge somberly.

"I am indeed sorry to hear that Estan Medina was shot," he said after a pause. "Even in the interests of the Cause it was absolutely unjustifiable. The man could do no harm; indeed, he served to divert suspicion from others. Only cra.s.s stupidity would resort to brute violence in the effort to further propaganda. Laying aside the human--"

"Of course," Elfigo interrupted sarcastically, "there's nothing violent in a revolution! Where do you get your argument for gentleness, Holly?

That's what bothers me. You can stir up a bunch of Mexicans quicker than a barrel of mezcal with your revolution talks."

"Ah, but you do not take into account the great, fundamental truth that cooperative effort, on the part of the proletariat, is wholly justifiable, in that it furthers the good of all humanity. Whereas violence on the part of the individual merely r.e.t.a.r.ds the final result for which we are striving. The murder of Estan Medina, for instance, may be the one display of individual violence which will nullify all our efforts toward a common good.

"For myself, I am bending every energy toward the formation of a cooperative colony which will demonstrate the feasibility of a cooperative form of government for the whole nation--the whole world, in fact. Your Junta has pledged itself to the a.s.sistance of this colony, the incalculable benefits of which will, I verily believe, be the very salvation of Mexico as a nation. Mexico, now in the throes of national parturition, is logically the pioneer in the true socialistic form of government. From Mexico the seed will be carried overseas to drop upon soil made fertile by the bones of those sacrificed to the blood-l.u.s.t of the war mad lords of Europe.

"Here, in this little corner of the world, is where the first tiny plant must be grown. Can you not grasp, then, the tremendous significance of what, on the face of it, is the pitifully small attempt of a pitifully weak people to strike a feeble blow for the freedom of labor? To frustrate that feeble blow now, by the irresponsible, lawless murder of a good citizen, merely because he failed at first to grasp the meaning of the lesson placed before him to learn, is, to my way of thinking, not only unjustifiable but d.a.m.nably weak and reprehensible."

Elfigo Apodaca, in another kitchen chair tilted back against an angle of the wall so that he half faced Holman Sommers, stretched out his legs and smiled tolerantly. A big, good-looking, thoroughly Americanized Mexican was Elfigo; the type of man who may be found at sunrise whipping the best stream in the State, the first morning of the trout season; the type of man whose machine noses in the closest to the judge's stand when a big race is on; the type of man who dances most, collects the most picture postals of pretty girls, laughs most at after-dinner speeches; the type of man who either does not marry at all, or attains much notoriety when the question of alimony is being fought out to the last cipher; the last man you would point out as a possible conspirator against anything save the peace and dignity of some other man's home. But it takes money to be all of these things, and Elfigo could see a million or two ahead of him along the revolution trail. That is why he smiled tolerantly upon his colleague who talked of humanity instead of dollars.

Then Elfigo harked back frowningly to what Holman Sommers had said about feebleness. He rolled his cigar from the right corner of his mouth to the left corner and spoke his thought.

"Speaking of feeble blow, and all that bunk," he said irreverently, "how do we stand, Holly? Just between you and me as men--cut out any interest we may have in the game--what's your honest opinion? Do we win?"

Holman Sommers raised one hand and hid the amused twitching of his lips.

He could have put that question far more clearly, he believed, and he could have expressed much better the thought that was in Elfigo's mind.

He had deliberately baited Elfigo, and it amused him to see how blindly the bait had been taken. He regarded Elfigo through half closed lids.

"As a matter of fact, and speaking relatively, every concerted revolt on the part of the proletariat is a victory. Though every leader in the movement be placed with his back against a stone wall, there to stand until he falls to the earth riddled with bullets, yet have the people won; a step nearer the goal, one more page writ in the glowing history of the advancement of the human race toward a true brotherhood of man. There can be no end save ultimate victory. That the victory may not be apparent for fifty years, or a hundred, cannot in any sense alter the immutable law of evolution. Posterity will point back to this present uprising as the first real blow struck for the freedom of the laboring cla.s.ses of Mexico, and, indirectly, of the whole world."

Elfigo, his thumbs hooked in the armholes of his vest, mark of the dominant note in the human male since clothes were invented to furnish armholes for egotistic thumbs, contemplated his polished tan shoes dissatisfiedly.

"Oh, to h.e.l.l with posterity!" he blurted impatiently. "What about us poor devils that's furnishing the time and money and brains to put it over? Do we get lined up against a wall?"

Holly Sommers chuckled. "Not if your car can put you across the line soon enough. Then, even though Mexico might be called upon to execute one Elfigo Apodaca as an example to the souls in bondage, some other bullet-riddled cadaver with your name and physical likeness would do as well as your own carca.s.s." He chuckled again.

"Cheerful prospect," grinned Elfigo ruefully. "But I like a sporting chance, myself. The real point I'm trying to get at is, what chance do you think the Alliance has got of winning? Come down outa the clouds, Holly, and never mind about humanity for a minute. You've helped organize the Alliance, you've talked to the hombres, you've been the G.o.d in the machine in this part of the country, and all that. Now be a prophet in words of one syllable and tell me what you think of the outlook."

With his fingers Holly Sommers packed the tobacco down into the bowl of his pipe. His whole expression changed from the philosopher to the cunning leader of what might well be called a forlorn hope.

"Speaking in words of one syllable, we have a d.a.m.n better chance than you may think," he said, in a tone as changed as his looks. "This country lies wide open to any attack that is sudden and unexpected. Labor is in a state of ferment. I predict that within a year we shall find ourselves upon the brink of a civil war, with labor and capital lined up against each other. Unless the government takes some definite step toward placating organized labor, the whole standing army will not be sufficient to keep the peace. That is the present internal condition, and that condition will grow worse until we face the real crisis of a national strike of some sort--I believe of the railroad employees, since that is the most far-reaching and would prove the most disastrous--therefore the most terrifying to the ruling cla.s.s.

"On the other hand, and turning our faces outward, we are not much better prepared for an emergency. We are a conceited nation, but insufferable national conceit never yet won a battle. We are given to shouting rather than shooting. Americanism to-day consists chiefly of standing up while the Star Spangled Banner is being played by a bra.s.s band, and of shooting off rockets on our national holiday. Were I of the capitalist cla.s.s, I should consider the situation desperate. But being allied with the workers, I can laugh.

"Speaking still in words of one syllable, Elfigo, I can safely prophesy what will happen first when the Alliance begins its active campaign.

Scarehead news in extra editions will be printed. The uprising will be greatly exaggerated, I have no doubt. Women and children will be reported ma.s.sacred, whereas the Alliance has no intention of being more barbarous than any warfare necessitates. Then there will be a buzzing of leagues and clubs; and the citizens will march up and down the business section of every town, bearing banners and shouting for the 'dear old flag.'

Women will rise up and sell sofa pillows and doilies to raise money to buy chewing gum for our soldier boys. That, Elfigo, will sufficiently occupy the ma.s.ses for a week or two.

"Going higher, red tape will begin to unroll and entwine the heads of departments, and every man who has any authority whatever will wait for orders from some one higher up. Therefore, while the whole nation cheers the street parades and the flags and the soldier boys and everything else in sight, the Alliance will be getting under way--"

"We'll throw her into high and step on her!" Elfigo contributed, being a motor enthusiast.

"Something like that, yes. When you consider that the transportation of troops to quell the uprising will require anywhere from three days to three weeks, I am counting red tape and all, you will readily apprehend how much may be accomplished before they are in a position to handle the situation.