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

not daring to state his real business with them, had asked for men to surround and take a holdup gang. All told, there were six of them when all had arrived, and they must have been astounded at what Starr told them in a prudent undertone and speaking swiftly. They did not say anything much, but slipped away after him and came to the high wall that hid so much menace.

"There was a hombre on guard across the street," Starr told the sheriff. "He went off to the fire, but he's liable to come back. Put a man over there in the shade of that junk shop to watch out for him and nab him before he can give the alarm. This is ticklish work, remember. Any Mexican in town would knife you if he knew what you're up to.

"Johnson, you can climb the pole and pull down on 'em through the skylight, but wait till you see by their actions that they've got the tip something's wrong, and don't shoot if you can help it. Remember this is Secret Service work, and the quieter it's done, the better pleased they'll be in Washington. There can't be any hullabaloo at all. You two fellows watch the front and back gates, and the no-shooting rule goes with you, too. If there's anything else you can do, don't shoot. But it's better to fire a cannon than let a man get away. Sabe? Now, Chief, you and the sheriff can come with me, and we'll bust up the meetin' for 'em."

He went up on the shoulder of the man who was to watch outside the rear wall, and straddled the wall for a brief reconnoiter. Evidently the Junta felt safe in their hidden little room, for no guard had been left in the yard. The back door was locked, and Starr opened it as silently as he could with his pass key. Close behind him came Sheriff O'Malley and the chief of police, whose name was Whittier. They had left their shoes beside the doorstep and walked in their socks, making no noise at all.

Starr did not dare use his searchlight, but felt his way down past the press and the forms, to where the stairs went up to the second floor. On the third step from the bottom, Starr, feeling his way with his hands, touched a dozing watchman and choked him into submission before the fellow had emitted more than a sleepy grunt of surprise. They left him gagged and tied to the iron leg of some heavy piece of machinery, and went on up the stairs, treading as stealthily as a prowling cat.

Starr turned to the right, found the door locked, and patiently turned his key a hair's breadth at a time in the lock, until he slid the bolt back. Behind him the repressed breathing of O'Malley fanned warmly the back of his neck. He pushed the door open a half inch at a time, found the outer office dark and silent, and crossed it stealthily to the closet behind the stove. O'Malley and Whittier were so close behind that he could feel them as they entered the closet and crept along its length.

Starr was reaching out before him with his hands, feeling for the door into the secret office, when Sheriff O'Malley struck his foot against the old tin spittoon, tried to cover the sound, and ran afoul of the brooms, which tripped him and sent him lurching against Starr. There in that small space where everything had been so deathly still the racket was appalling. O'Malley was not much given to secret work; he forgot himself now and swore just as full-toned and just as fluently as though be had tripped in the dark over his own wheelbarrow in his own back yard.

Starr threw himself against the end of the closet where he knew the door was hidden in the wall, felt the yielding of a board, and heaved against it with his shoulder. He landed almost on top of a fat-jowled representative from Santa Fé, but he landed muzzle foremost, as it were, and he was telling the twelve to put up their hands even before he had his feet solidly planted on the floor.

Holman Sommers sat facing him. He had been writing, and he still held his pencil in his hand. He slowly crumpled the sheet of paper, his vivid eyes lifted to Starr's face. Tragic eyes they were then, for beyond Starr they looked into the stern face of the government he would have defied. They looked upon the wreck of his dearest dream; upon the tightening chains of the wage slaves he would have freed—or so he dreamed.

Starr stared back, his own mind visioning swiftly the havoc he had wrought in the dream of this leader of men. He saw, not a political outlaw caught before he could do harm to his country, but a man fated to bear in his great brain an idea born generations too soon into a brawling world of ideas that warred always with sordid circumstance. A hundred years hence this man might be called great. Now he was nothing more than a political outlaw chief, trapped with his band of lesser outlaws.

Sommers' eyes lightened impishly. His thin lips twisted in a smile at the damnable joke which Life was playing there in that room.

"Gentlemen of the Junta," he said in his sonorous, public-platform voice, "I find it expedient, because of untoward circumstances, to advise that you make no resistance. From the unceremonious and unheralded entry of our esteemed opponents, these political prostitutes who have had the effrontery to come here in the employ of a damnable system of political tyranny and frustrate our plans for the liberation of our comrades in slavery, I apprehend the fact that we have been basely betrayed by some foul Judas among us. I am left with no alternative but to advise that you surrender your bodies to these minions of what they please to call the law.

"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!"

Starr's eyes were troubled, but his gun did not waver. It pointed straight at the breast of Holman Sommers, who looked at him measuringly when he had finished speaking.

"I can't argue about the idea back of this business," Starr said gravely. "All I can do is my duty. Put on these handcuffs, Mr. Sommers. They stand for something you ain't big enough to lick—yet."

"Certainly," said Holman Sommers composedly. "You put the case like a philosopher. Like a philosopher I yield to the power which, I grant you, we are not big enough to lick—yet. In behalf of our Cause, however, permit me to call your attention to the fact that we might have come nearer to victory, had you not discovered and interrupted this meeting to-night." Though his face was paler than was natural, he slipped on the manacles as matter-of-factly as he would have put on clean cuffs, and rose from his chair prepared to go where Starr directed.

"No, sit down again," said Starr brusquely. "Sheriff, gather up all those pieces of paper for evidence against these men, and give them to me. Give me a receipt for the men—I'll wait for it. I want you and Chief Whittier to hold them here in this room till I come back. I won't be long—half an hour, maybe." He took the slips of paper which the sheriff folded and handed to him, and slipped them into his pocket.

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, hell 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