Chapter 20

STARR DISCOVERS THINGS

Starr was sitting on the side of his bed with one boot off and dangling in his hand, and with his thoughts gone journeying out over the mesa and the desert and the granite ridge beyond, to a squatty, two-room adobe shack at the head of Sunlight Basin. During the days he had been too fully occupied with the work he had to do to dwell much on the miserable fact of Helen May's duplicity, her guilt of the crime of treason against her native country. But at night the thought of her haunted him like the fevered ache of a wound too deep to heal quickly.

He swore an abrupt oath as a concrete expression of his mood, and dropped the boot with a thump to the floor. The word and the action served to swing his thoughts into another channel not much more pleasant, but a great deal more impersonal.

"He's shore foxy--that hombre!" he said, thinking of Elfigo Apodaca.

As matters stood that evening, Starr felt that Elfigo had the right to laugh at him and the whole Secret Service. Elfigo was in jail, yes. Only that day he had been given his preliminary hearing on the charge of murdering Estan Medina, and he had been remanded without bail to await trial.

On the face of it, that looked as though Starr had gained a point. In reality he felt that he had in some manner played into Elfigo's hands. Certainly he had not gained anything in the way of producing any buzzing of the Alliance leaders. Not a Mexican had shown his face at the hearing, save Luis Medina and his mother, who had been called as witnesses.

Luis had been badly scared but stubborn, insisting that he had heard Elfigo call Estan from the house just before the shot was fired. The mother also had been badly frightened, but not at all stubborn. Indeed, she was not even certain of anything beyond the drear fact that her son was dead, and that he had fallen with the lamp in his hand, unarmed and unsuspecting. She was frightened at the unknown, terrible Law that had brought her there before the judge, and not at anything tangible.

But Luis knew exactly what it was he feared. Starr read that in his eyes whenever they turned toward the calm, inscrutably smiling Elfigo. Hate was in the eyes of Luis, but the hate was almost submerged by the terror that filled him. He shook when he stood up to take the oath. His voice trembled in spite of him when he spoke; but he spoke boldly for all that--falsely, too. He had lied when he told of the quarrel over the old water right. It was not a water right which the two had discussed, and Starr knew it.

But it was Elfigo that puzzled Starr most. Elfigo had smiled, as though the whole thing amused him even though it annoyed him to be under arrest. He denied, of course, that he had known anything at all about the murder until it was common news about town. He had been somewhere else at the time Estan was shot, and he could and would prove, when the time came,