Starr, of the Desert Part 22

He was gone a little longer than he said, for he had some trouble in locating the railroad official he wanted, and in convincing that sleepy official that he was speaking for the government when he demanded an engine and day coach to be placed on a certain dark siding he mentioned, ready for a swift night run to El Paso and a little beyond--to Fort Bliss, in fact.

He got it, trust Starr for that! And he was only twenty minutes behind the time he had named, though the sheriff and the chief of police betrayed a nervous relief when he walked in upon them and announced that he was ready now to move the prisoners.

They untied the terrified watchman and added him to the group. In the dark, and by way of vacant lots and unlighted streets, he took them to a certain point where an engine had just backed a single, unlighted day coach on to a siding and stood there with air-pump wheezing and the engineer crawling around beneath with his oil can. By the rear steps of the coach a mystified conductor stood waiting with his lantern hidden under his coat. A big man was the conductor; once a policeman and therefore with a keen nose--don't laugh!--for mysteries.

He wore a satisfied look when he saw the men that were being hustled into 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, h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed not more than a hundred yards from Vic and the goats, and that Vic had shouted "h.e.l.lo" 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 m.u.f.fled 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 pa.s.sionlessly.

"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 G.o.d's name did you tangle up with 'em for?" he flashed in a sudden pa.s.sion 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 ma.n.u.script 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 a.s.sure 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 doc.u.ment, the connotation is marred somewhat when stars is spelled "Starr's."

"Very apologetically your friend,