B. M. Bower

“ Rabbit was a perfectly dependable little range horse, and sensible beyond most horses. He was ambling along at his easy little fox-trot that would carry Starr many a mile in a day, and he had his eyes half shut against the sun glare, and his nose almost at a level with his knees. I suppose he was dreaming of cool pastures or something like that, when a rattlesnake, coiled in the scant shade of a weed, lifted his tail and buzzed as stridently, as abruptly as thirteen rattles and a button can buzz. ”

“ There was no romance, nothing like adventure here nowadays, said Helen May to herself, while she watched the little geysers of dust go dancing like whirling dervishes across the sand. A person lived on canned stuff and kept goats and was abjectly pleased to see any kind of human being. There certainly was no romance left in the country, though it had seemed almost as though there might be, when her Man of the Desert sang and all the little night-sounds hushed to listen, and the moon-trail across the sand of the desert lay like a ribbon of silver. ”

“ Like many men, Peter could not seem to understand his son half as well as he understood his daughter. He could not see why Vic should frivol away his time; why he should have all those funny little conceits and airs of youth; why he should lord it over Helen May who was every day proving her efficiency and her strength of character anew. If Helen May went the way her mother had gone, Peter felt that he would be alone, and that life would be quite bare and bleak and empty of every incentive toward bearing the little daily burdens of existence. ”

“ They burned always with some inner fire of life; they laughed at life, and yet they did not seem to express mirth. They seemed to say that life was a joke, a damnable joke on mankind; that they saw the joke and resented it even while they laughed at it. For the rest, the man was more than fifty years old, but his hair was thick and black as a crow, and his eyebrows were inclined to bushiness, inclined also to slant upward. A strong face; an unusual face, but a likeable one, it was. And that is a fair description of Holman Sommers as Helen May first saw him. ”

“ It was what Starr wanted most of all, just then, for it left him free to study what she had told him of the big black automobile with four coated and goggled men who had looked like Mexicans; four men who had glared at her and then had speeded up to get away from her possible scrutiny.
For the first time since she had seen it from the spring seat of a jolting wagon from the one livery stable in Malpais, Helen May discovered that this wild, strange land was beautiful. For the first time she gloried in its bigness and its wildness, and did not resent its barrenness. ”

“ As often happens, Starr had formed a mental picture of Holman Sommers which was really the picture of a type made familiar to us mostly by our humorists. He had imagined that Holman Sommers, being a "highbrow," was a little, dried-up man with a bald head and weak eyes that made spectacles a part of his face; an insignificant little man well past middle life, with a gray beard, Starr saw him mentally. He should have known better than to let his imagination paint him a portrait of any man, in those ticklish times. ”

“ Whether we part now, to spend the remaining years of our life in some foul dungeon; whether to die a martyr's death on the scaffold, or whether the workers of the land awake to their power and, under some wiser, stronger leadership, liberate us to enjoy the fruits of the harvest we have but sown, I cannot attempt to prophesy. We have done what we could for our fellowmen. We have not failed, for though we perish, yet our blood shall fructify what we have sown, that our sons and our sons' sons may reap the garnered grain. Gentlemen, of the Junta, I declare our meeting adjourned! ”

“ She felt better after that, and she rather enjoyed the plump sister of Holman Sommers. The plump sister called him Holly, and seemed to be inordinately proud of his learning and inordinately fond of nagging at him over little things. She was what Helen May called a vegetable type of woman. She did not seem to have any great emotions in her make-up. She sat in the one rocking-chair under the mesquite tree and crocheted lace and talked comfortably about Holly and her chickens in the same breath, and frankly admired Helen May's "spunk" in living out alone like that. ”

“ Rabbit, it seems had been pacing along, half asleep in the blistering heat of midday, among the cactus and the greasewood and those depressing, yellowish weeds that pretend to be clothing the desert with verdure, when they are merely emphasizing its barrenness. Starr had been half asleep too, riding with one leg over the saddle horn to rest his muscles, and with his hat brim pulled down over his eyebrows to shade his eyes from the pitiless glare of New Mexico sunlight. Rabbit might be depended upon to dodge the prairie dog holes and rocks and dirt hummocks, day or night, waking or sleeping ”

“ Now, as I have said before, San Bonito was full of young Mexicans who wore Stetson hats and favored horsehair bands around them. Starr glanced at the fellow sharply, got the uninterested, impersonal look of the perfect stranger who neither knows nor cares who you are, and who has troubles of his own to occupy his mind; the look which nineteen persons out of twenty give to a stranger on the street. Starr went on unconcernedly whistling under his breath, but at the corner he turned sharply to the left, and in turning he flicked a glance back at the fellow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And it was a rocky ridge if ever there was one; granite outcroppings, cobblestones, boulders, anything but good loose soil where tracks might be followed. A dog might have followed a trail there before the scent was baked out by blistering heat; but Starr certainly could not.
He stood looking across to where the smoke curled up into the intense Blue of the sky. If a man wanted to reach the Medina ranch by the most obscure route, he thought, this would be one way to get there. He went back to where the automobile had stood and searched there for some sign of those who had ridden this far. ”

“ And think of me being so hard up for excitement that I've got to play he's some mysterious creature of the desert! Honest to goodness, Pat, it's got so bad that the mere sight of a real, live man is thrilling. When Holman Sommers comes and lifts that old Panama like a crown prince, and smiles at me and talks about all the different periods of the human race, and gems and tribal laws and all that highbrow dope, I just sit and drink it in and wish he'd keep on for hours! ”

“ 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!" ”

“ There again he found the prints of Helen May's small, mountain boots, prints which he had come to know very well. And close to them, looking as though the two had stood together, were the larger, deeper tracks of a man.
Starr dared not rise and stand upright. He must keep always under cover from any chance spying from below. He could not, therefore, trace the footprints down the peak. But he got some idea of the man's direction when he left, and he knew, of course, where to find Helen May. He did not connect the two in his mind, beyond registering clearly in his memory the two sets of tracks. ”

“ So Helen May, who was something of a dreamer when Life let her alone long enough, rode home through the moonlight and wove cloth-of-gold from the magic of the night, and with the fairy fabric she clothed Starr—who was, as we know, just an ordinary human being—so that he walked before her, not as a plain, ungrammatical, sometimes profane young man who was helping her home with her goats, but a mysterious, romantic figure evolved somehow out of the vastness in which she lived ”

“ Starr instructed her quietly. "He'll follow me, and he'll pick his own trail. You don't have to do a thing but sit there and take it easy. He'll do the rest."
Helen May looked at him doubtfully, but she did not say anything. She braced herself in the stirrups, took a firm grip of the saddlehorn with one hand, and waited for what might befall. She had no fear of Starr, no further uneasiness over the coming night, the loneliness, the goats, or anything else. She felt as irresponsible, as safe, as any sheltered woman in her own home. ”

“ Helen May continued to watch him, but she was piqued at his calm indifference. Why, she told herself petulantly, he paid more attention to those goats than he did to her—and one would think, after that song and that look.... But there she stopped, precipitately retreating from the thought of that look.
He was a queer fellow, she told herself with careful tolerance and a little condescension. A true product of the desert; as changeable and as sphynxlike and as impossible from any personal, human standpoint. Look how beautiful the desert could be, how terribly uplifting and calm and—and big. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Helen May had felt just a little resentful of the words downright improvidence. Had she not walked rather than spend money and grass on a horse? Had she not daily denied herself things which she considered necessities, that she might husband the precious balance of Peter's insurance money? But she swallowed her resentment and thanked him quite humbly for his kindness in telling her how to manage. She owned to her inexperience, and she said that she would greatly appreciate any advice which he might care to give. ”

“ At night the stars seemed to come down and hang just over Helen May's head. There was the little cottage of which Peter had dreamed—only Helen May called it a miserable little shack—hunched against a hill; sometimes a light winked through the window at the stars; sometimes Helen May was startled at the nearness and the shrill insistence of the coyotes. Here as Peter had dreamed so longingly and so hopelessly, were distance and quiet and calm. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Helen May stood on the knobby, brown rock pinnacle that formed the head of Sunlight Basin and stared resentfully out over the baked desert and the forbidding hills and the occasional grassy hollows that stretched away and away to the skyline. So clear was the air that every slope, every hollow, every acarpous hilltop lay pitilessly revealed to her unfriendly eyes, until the sheer immensity of distance veiled its barrenness in a haze of tender violet. ”

“ But a general uprising in three States, in conjunction with, and under the control of, a concerted, far-sweeping revolution across the border, would not be a thing to laugh over. Uncle Sam smiled tolerantly when some would have had him chastise. Uncle Sam smiled, and watched, and waited and drummed his fingers while he read secret reports from men away out somewhere in Arizona, and New Mexico, and Texas, and urged them to burrow deeper and deeper underground, and to follow at any cost the molelike twistings and blind turnings of this plot to steal away three whole States in a lump. ”

“ 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 horse was a pudgy bay that set his feet stolidly down in the trail, and dragged his toes through it as though he delighted in kicking up all the dust he could. By that trick he had puzzled Helen May a little, just at first, though he had not been able to simulate the passing of four horses. The buggy was such as improvident farmers used to drive (before they bought Fords) near harvest time; scaly as to paint, warped and loose-spoked as to wheels, making more noise than progress along the country roads. ”