Starr, of the Desert, B. M. Bower [historical books to read txt] 📗

seen how she had prepared herself for an emergency. She had only yesterday told him emphatically how harmless she considered the country; and he had been careful to warn her only about rabid coyotes, so that without being alarmed, she would not go unarmed away from home. It seemed queer to Starr that she should act as though she expected rabid coyotes to come a-knocking at her door in broad daylight. Had she, he thought swiftly, been only pretending that she considered the country perfectly safe?

He could not help it; that six-shooter hidden in the folds of her skirt stuck in his mind. It was just a trifle, like her lighted window at one o'clock in the morning; like that strange man who had called on her just after Starr had left her, and with whom she had seemed to be on such friendly terms. He had warned her of coyotes. She was not supposed to know that it was wise to arm herself before she opened her door to a daylight caller. At night, yes. But at seven o'clock in the morning? Starr did not suspect Helen May of anything, but he had been trained to suspect mysterious trifles. In spite of himself, this trifle nagged at him unpleasantly.

He fancied that Helen May was just a shade flustered in her welcome; just a shade nervous in her movements, in her laughter, in the very tones of her voice.

"You're out early," she said. "Vic isn't up yet; I suppose the goats ought to be let out, too. You couldn't have had your breakfast—or have you? One can expect almost anything of a man who just rides out of nowhere at all hours, and disappears into nowhere."

"I shore wish that was so," Starr retorted banteringly. "I wish I had to ride nowhere to-day."

"Oh, I meant the mystery of the unknown," she hurried to correct herself. "You come out of the desert just any old time. And you go off into the desert just as unexpectedly; by the way, did you—"

"Nope. I did not." She might forget that Vic was in the house, but Starr never forgot things of that sort, and he wilfully forestalled her intention to ask about the shooting. "I didn't have any supper, either, beyond a sandwich or two that was mostly sand after I'd packed 'em around all day. I just naturally had to turn tramp and come ask for a handout, when I found out at daylight how close I was to breakfast."

"Why, of course. You know you won't have to beg very hard. I was just going to put on the coffee. So you make yourself at home, and I'll have breakfast in a few minutes. Vic, for gracious sake, get up! Here's company already. And you'll have to let out the goats. Pat can keep them together awhile, but he can't open the gate, and I'm busy."

Starr heard the prodigious yawn of the awakening Vic, who slept behind a screen in the kitchen, bedrooms being a superfluous luxury in which Johnny Calvert had not indulged himself. Starr followed her to the doorway.

"I'll go let out the goats," he offered. "I want to take off the bridle anyway, so Rabbit can feed around a little." He let himself out into the whooping wind, feeling, for some inexplicable reason, depressed when he had expected to feel only relief.

"Lord! I'm getting to the point where anything that ain't accompanied by a chart and diagrams looks suspicious to me. She's got more hawse sense than I gave her credit for, that's all. She musta seen through my yarnin' about them mad coyotes. She's pretty cute, coming to the door with her six-gun just like a real one! And never letting on to me that she had it right handy. I must be getting off my feed or something, the way I take things wrong. Now her being up late—I'm just going to mention how far off I saw her light burning—and how late it was. I'll see what she says about it."

But he did nothing of the kind, and for what he considered a very good reason. The wind was blowing in eddying gusts, of the kind that seizes and whirls things; such a gust swooped into the room when he opened the door, seized upon some papers which lay on her writing desk, and sent them clear across the room.

Starr hastily closed the door and rescued the papers where they had flattened against the wall; and he wished he had gone blind before he saw what they were. A glance was all he gave, at first—the involuntary glance which one gives to a bit of writing picked up in an odd place—but that was enough to chill his blood with the shock of damning enlightenment. A page of writing, it was, fine, symmetrical, hard to decipher—a page of Holly Sommers' manuscript; you know that, of course.

But Starr did not know. He only knew the writing matched the pages of revolutionary stuff he had found in the office of Las Nuevas. There was no need of comparing the two; the writing was unmistakable. And he believed that Helen May was the writer. He believed it when he glanced up and saw her coming in from the kitchen, and saw her eyes go to what he had in his hand, and saw the start she gave before she hurried to take the paper away.

"My gracious! My work—" she said agitatedly, when she had the papers in her hand. She went to her desk, looking perturbed, and gave a quick, seeking glance at the scattered papers there; then at Starr.

"Did any more—?"

"That's all," Starr said gravely. "It was the wind when I opened the door, caught them."

"My own carelessness. I don't know why I left my desk open," she said. And while he stood looking at her, she pulled down the roll-top with a slam, still visibly perturbed.

It was strange, he thought, that she should have a roll-top desk out here, anyway. He had seen it the other time he was at the house, and it had struck him then as queer, though he had not given it more than a passing thought.

As a matter of fact, it was not queer. Johnny Calvert had dilated on the destructiveness of rats, "pack rats" he called them. They would chew paper all to bits, he said. So Helen May, being finicky about having her papers chewed, had brought along this mouse-proof desk with her other furniture from Los Angeles.

Her perturbed manner, too, was the result of a finicky distaste for having any disorder in her papers, especially when it was work intrusted to her professionally. She never talked about the work she did for people, and she always kept it away from the eyes of those not concerned in it. That, she considered, was professional etiquette. She had strained a point when she had read a little of the manuscript to Vic. Vic was just a kid, and he was her brother, and he wouldn't understand what she read any more than would the horned toad down by the spring. But Starr was different, and she felt that she had been terribly careless and unprofessional, leaving the manuscript where pages could blow around the room. What if a page had blown outside and got lost!

Starr had turned his back and was staring out of the window. He might have been staring at a blank wall, for all he saw through the glass. He was as pale as though he had just received some great physical shock, and he had his hands doubled up into fists, so that his knuckles were white. His eyes were almost gray instead of hazel, and they were hard and hurt-looking.

Something in the set of his head and in the way his shoulders had stiffened told Helen May that things had gone wrong just in the last few minutes. She gave him a second questioning glance, felt her heart go heavy while her brain seemed suddenly blank, and retreated to the kitchen.

Helen May, influenced it may be by Starr's anxious thoughts of her, had dreamed of him; one of those vivid, intimate dreams that color our moods and our thoughts long after we awaken. She had dreamed of being with him in the moonlight again; and Starr had sung again the love song of the desert, and had afterwards taken her in his arms and held her close, and kissed her twice lingeringly, looking deep into her eyes afterwards.

She had awakened with the thrill of those kisses still tingling her lips, so that she had covered her face with both hands in a sort of shamed joy that dreams could be so terribly real—so terribly sweet, too. And then, not fifteen minutes after she awoke, and while the dream yet clogged her reason, Starr himself had confronted her when she opened the door. She would have been a remarkable young woman if she had not been flustered and nervous and inclined toward incoherent speech.

And now, it was perfectly idiotic to judge a man's temper by the back of his neck, she told herself fiercely in the kitchen; perfectly idiotic, yet she did it. She was impressed with his displeasure, his bitterness, with some change in him which she could not define to herself. She wanted to cry, and she did not in the least know what there could possibly be to cry about.

Vic appeared, tousled and yawning and stupid as an owl in the sun. He growled because the water bucket was empty and he must go to the spring, and he irritated Helen May to the point of wanting to shake him, when he went limping down the path. She even called out sharply that he was limping with the wrong foot, and that he ought to tie a string around his lame ankle so he could remember which one it was. Which made her feel more disagreeable than ever, because Vic really did have a bad ankle, as the swelling had proven when he went to bed last night.

Nothing seemed to go right, after that. She scorched the bacon, and she caught her sleeve on the handle of the coffee pot and spilled about half the coffee, besides burning her wrist to a blister. She broke a cup, but that had been cracked when she came, and at any other time she would not have been surprised at all, or jarred out of her calm. She took out the muffins she had hurried to make for Starr, and they stuck to the tins and came out in ragged pieces, which is enough to drive any woman desperate, I suppose. Vic slopped water on the floor when he came back with the bucket full, and the wind swooped a lot of sand into the kitchen, and she was certain the bacon would be gritty as well as burned.

Of Starr she had not heard a sound, and she went to the door nervously to call him when breakfast was at last on the table. He was standing exactly as he had stood when she left the room. So far as she could see, he had not moved a muscle or turned his head or winked an eyelid. His stoniness chilled her so that it was an effort to form words to tell him that breakfast was ready.

There was an instant's pause before he turned, and Helen May felt that he had almost decided not to eat. But he followed her to the kitchen and spoke to Vic quite humanly, as he took the chair she offered, and unfolded the napkin that struck an odd note of refinement among its makeshift surroundings; for the stove had only two real legs, the other two corners being propped up on rocks; the dish cupboard was of boxes, and everything in the way of food supplies stood scantily hidden behind thin curtains of white dotted swiss that Helen May had brought with her.

An hour ago Starr would have dwelt gloatingly upon these graceful evidences of Helen May's brave fight against the crudities of her surroundings. Now they gave him a keener thrust of pain. So did the tremble of her hand when Helen May poured his coffee; it betrayed to Starr her guilty fear that he had seen what was on those two papers. He glanced up at her face, and caught her own troubled glance just flicking away from him. She was scared, then! he told himself. She was watching to see if he had read anything that seemed suspicious. Well, he'd have to calm her down a little, just as a matter of policy. He couldn't