Chapter 22 - Page 2

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 passed 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 passed