Starr-of the Desert Page 11

  Well, at any rate, he knew now how the thing had started. He heaved a sigh of relief and threw himself down on the bed, wadding the pillow into a hard ball under the nape of his neck and unfolding the Mexican newspaper. He had intended to move camp; but now that they had begun to trail him, he decided to stay where he was and give them a run for their money, as he put it.

  Starr could read Spanish well enough for ordinary purposes. He went carefully through Las Nuevas, from war news to the local advertisements. There was nothing that could even be twisted into a message of hidden meaning to the initiated. Las Nuevas was what it called itself: The News. It was exactly as innocuous as he had believed it to be. Its editorial page, even, was absolutely banal in its servility to the city, county, state and national policy.

  "That's a hell of a thing to steal!" grumbled Starr, and threw the paper disgustedly from him.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  STARR FINDS SOMETHING IN A SECRET ROOM

  That day Starr rode out into the country and looked at a few head of cows and steers that a sickly American wanted to sell so he could go East for his health (there being in most of us some peculiar psychological leaning toward seeking health afar). Starr went back to town afterwards and made Rabbit comfortable in the corral, reasoning that if he were going to be watched, he would be watched no matter where he went; but he ate his supper in the dining room of the Plaza Hotel, and sat in the lobby talking with a couple of facetious drummers until the mechanical piano in the movie show across the street began to play.

  He went to the show, sat through it patiently, strolled out when it was over, and visited a saloon or two. Then, when he thought his evening might be considered well rounded out with harmless diversions, he went out to his cabin, following the main street but keeping well in the shadow as though he wished to avoid observation.

  He had reason to believe that some one followed him out there, which did not displease him much. He lighted his lamp and fussed around for half an hour or so before he blew out the light and went to bed.

  At three o'clock in the morning, with a wind howling in from the mountains, Starr got up and dressed in the dark, fumbling for a pair of "sneakers" he had placed beside his bed. He let himself out into the corral, being careful to keep close to the wall of the house until he reached the high board fence. Here, too, he had to feel his way because of the pitchy blackness of the night; and if the rattling wind prevented him from hearing any footsteps that might be behind him, it also covered the slight sound of his own progress down the fence to the shed. But he did not think he would be seen or followed, for he had been careful to oil the latch and hinges of his door before he went to bed; and he would be a faithful spy indeed who shivered through the whole night, watching a man who apparently slept unsuspectingly and at peace.

  Down the hole from the manger Starr slid, and into the arroyo bottom. He stumbled over a can of some sort, but the wind was rattling everything movable, so he merely swore under his breath and went on. He was not a range man for nothing, and he found his way easily to the adobe house with LAS NUEVAS over the door, and the adobe wall with the plank gate that had been closed.

  It was closed now, and the house itself was black and silent. Starr stooped and gave a jump, caught the top of the wall with his hooked fingers, went up and straddled the top where it was pitch black against the building. For that matter, it was nearly pitch black whichever way one looked, that night. He sat there for five minutes, listening and straining his eyes into the enclosure. Somewhere a piece of corrugated iron banged against a board. Once he heard a cat meow, away back at the rear of the lot. He waited through a comparative lull, and when the wind whooped again and struck the building with a fresh blast, Starr jumped to the ground within the yard.

  He crouched for a minute, a shot-loaded quirt held butt forward in his hand. He did not want to use a gun unless he had to, and the loaded end of a good quirt makes a very efficient substitute for a blackjack. But there was no movement save the wind, so presently he followed the wall of the house down to the corner, stood there listening for awhile and went on, feeling his way rapidly around the entire yard as a blind man feels out a room that is strange to him.

  He found the garage, with a door that kept swinging to and fro in the wind, banging shut with a slam and then squealing the hinges as it opened again with the suction. He drew a breath of relief when he came to that door, for he knew that any man who happened to be on guard would have fastened it for the sake of his nerves if for nothing else.

  When he was sure that the place was deserted for the night, Starr went back to the garage and went inside. He fastened the door shut behind him and switched on his pocket searchlight to examine the place. If he had expected to see the mysterious black car there he was disappointed, for the garage was empty—which perhaps explained the swinging door, that had been left open in the evening when there was no wind. Small comfort in that for Starr, for it immediately occurred to him that the car would probably return before daylight if it had gone after dark.

  He turned his hand slowly, painting the walls with a brush of brilliant light. "Huh!" he grunted under his breath. For there in a far corner were four Silvertown cord tires with the dust of the desert still clinging to the creases of the lined tread. Near-by, where they had been torn off in haste and flung aside, were the paper wrappings of four other tires, supposedly new.

  So they—he had no more definite term by which to call them—they had sensed the risk of those unusual tires, and had changed for others of a more commonly-used brand! Starr wondered if some one had seen him looking at tire-tracks, the young Mexican he had met on the side street, perhaps. Or the Mexican garage man may have caught him studying that track by the filling-pump.

  "Well," Starr summed up the significance of the discovery, "the game's open; now we'll get action."

  He glanced down to make sure that he had not left any tracks on the floor and was glad he had not worn his boots. Then he snapped off the light, went out, and left the door swinging and banging as it had been before. If he learned no more, at least he was paid for the trip.

  He went straight to the rear door of the building, taking no pains to conceal his footsteps. The wind, he knew, would brush them out completely with the sand and dust it sent swirling around the yard with every gust. As he had hoped, the door was not bolted but locked with a key, so he let himself in with one of the pass keys he carried for just such work as this. He felt at the windows and saw that the blinds were down, and turned on his light.

  The place had all the greasy dinginess of the ordinary print shop. The presses were here, and the motor that operated them. Being a bi-weekly and not having much job printing to do, it was evident that Las Nuevas did not work overtime. Things were cleaned up for the night and ready for the next day's work. It all looked very commonplace and as innocent as the paper it produced.

  Starr went on slowly, examining the forms, the imperfect first proofs of circulars and placards that had been placed on hook files. AVISO! stared up at him in big, black type from the top of many small sheets, with the following notices of sales, penalties attached for violations of certain ordinances, and what not. But there was nothing that should not be there, nothing that could be construed as seditionary in any sense of the word.

  Still, some person or persons connected with this place had found it expedient to change four perfectly good and quite expensive tires for four new and perfectly commonplace ones, and the only explanation possible was that the distinctive tread of the expensive ones had been observed. There must, Starr reasoned, be something else in this place which it would be worth his while to discover. He therefore went carefully up the grimy stairway to the rooms above.

  These were offices of the comfortless type to be found in small towns. Bare floors, stained with tobacco juice and the dust of the street. Bare desks and tables, some of them unpainted, homemade affairs, all of them cheap and old. A stove in the larger office, a few wooden-seated armchairs. Starr took in t
he details with a flick here and there of his flashlight that he kept carefully turned away from the green-shaded windows.

  News items, used and unused, he found impaled on desk files. Bills paid and unpaid he found also. But in the first search he found nothing else, nothing that might not be found in any third-rate newspaper establishment. He stood in the middle room—there were three in a row, with an empty, loft-like room behind—and considered where else he could search.

  He went again to a closet that had been built in with boards behind the chimney. At first glance this held nothing but decrepit brooms, a battered spittoon, and a small pile of greasewood cut to fit the heater in the larger room; but Starr went in and flashed his light around the wall. He found a door at the farther end, and he knew it for a door only when he passed his hands over the wall and felt it yield. He pushed it open and went into another room evidently built across one end of the loft, a room cunningly concealed and therefore a room likely to hold secrets.

  He hitched his gun forward a little, pushed the door shut behind him, and began to search that room. Here, as in the outer offices, the first superficial examination revealed nothing out of the way. But Starr did not go at things superficially. First the desk came under close scrutiny. There were no letters; they were too cautious for that, evidently. He looked in the little stove that stood near the wall where the chimney went up in the closet, and saw that the ashes consisted mostly of charred paper. But the last ones deposited therein had not yet been lighted, or, more exactly, they had been lighted hastily and had not burned except around the edges. He lifted out the one on top and the one beneath it. They were two sheets of copy paper scribbled closely in pencil. The first was entitled, with heavy underscoring that signified capitals, "Souls in Bondage." This sounded interesting, and Starr put the papers in his pocket. The others were envelopes addressed to Las Nuevas; there was no more than a handful of papers in all.

  In a drawer of the desk, which he opened with a skeleton key, he found many small leaflets printed in Mexican. Since they were headed ALMAS DE CAUTIVERO, he took one and hoped that it would not be missed. There were other piles of leaflets in other drawers, and he helped himself to a sample of each, and relocked the drawers carefully. But search as he might, he could find nothing that identified any individual, or even pointed to any individual as being concerned in this propaganda work; nor could he find any mention of the Mexican Alliance.

  He went out finally, let the door swing behind him as it seemed accustomed to do, climbed through a window to the veranda that bordered all these rooms like a jutting eyebrow, and slid down a corner post to the street. It was close to dawn, and Starr had no wish to be found near the place; indeed, he had no wish to be found away from his cabin if any one came there with the breaking of day to watch him.

  As he had left the cabin, so he returned to it. He went back to bed and lay there until sunrise, piecing together the scraps of information he had gleaned. So far, he felt that he was ahead of the game; that he had learned more about the Alliance than the Alliance had learned about him.

  As soon as the light was strong enough for him to read without a lamp, he

  took from his pocket the papers he had gleaned from the stove, spread out

  the first and began to decipher the handwriting. And this is what he

  finally made out:

  "Souls in Bondage:

  "The plundering plutocrats who suck the very life blood of your mother country under the guise of the development of her resources, are working in harmony with the rich brigands north of the border to plunder you further, and to despoil the fair land you have helped to win from the wilderness.

  "Shall strong men be content in their slavery to the greed of others? Rise up and help us show the plunderers that we are men, not slaves. Let this shameless persecution of your mother country cease!

  "American bandits would subjugate and annex the richest portion of Mexico. Why should not Mexico therefore reclaim her own? Why not turn the tables and annex a part of the vast territory stolen from her by the octopus arms of our capitalist class?

  "We are a proud people and we never forget. Are we a cowardly people who would cringe and yield when submission means infamy?

  "Awake! Strike one swift, successful blow for freedom and your bleeding mother land.

  "Texas, New Mexico, California and Arizona were stolen from Mexico, just as the riches of her mines are being stolen from her to-day. Sons of Mexico, you can help her reclaim her own. Will you stand by and see her further despoiled? Let your voices rise in a mighty cry for justice! Let your arms be strong to strike a blow for the right!

  "Souls in bondage, wake up and strike off your shackles! Be not slaves but free men!

  "Texas, New Mexico and Arizona for Mexico, to whom they rightfully belong!"

  "They sure do make it strong enough," Starr commented, feeling for a match with which to relight his cigarette that had gone out. He laid down the written pages and took up the leaflet entitled, "ALMAS DE CAUTIVERO." The text that followed was like the heading, simply a translation into Spanish of the exhortation he had just read in English. But he read it through and noted the places where the Spanish version was even more inflammatory than the English—which, in Starr's opinion, was going some. The other pamphlets were much the same, citing well-known instances of the revolution across the border which seemed to prove conclusively that justice was no more than a jest, and that the proletariat of Mexico was getting the worst of the bargain, no matter who happened to be in power.

  Starr frowned thoughtfully over the reading. To him the thing was treason, and it was his business to help stamp it out. For the powers that be cannot afford to tolerate the planting of such seeds of dissatisfaction amongst the untrained minds of the masses.

  But, and Starr admitted it to himself with his mouth pulled down at the corners, the worst of it was that under the bombast, under the vituperative utterances, the catch phrases of radicalism, there remained the grains of truth. Starr knew that the masses of Mexico were suffering, broken under the tramplings of revolution and counter-revolution that swept back and forth from gulf to gulf. Still, it was not his business to sift out the plump grains of truth and justice, but to keep the chaff from lighting and spreading a wildfire of sedition through three States.

  "'Souls in bondage' is right," he said, setting his feet to the floor and reaching for his boots. "In bondage to their own helplessness, and helpless because they're so damned ignorant. But," he added grimly while he stamped his right foot into its boot, "they ain't going at it the right way. They're tryin' to tear down, when they ain't ready to build anything on the wreck. They're right about the wrong; but they're wrong as the devil about the way to mend it. Them pamphlets will sure raise hell amongst the Mexicans, if the thing ain't stopped pronto."

  He dressed for riding, and went out and fed Rabbit before he went thoughtfully up to the hotel for his breakfast.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  HELEN MAY SIGHS FOR ROMANCE

  Helen May was toiling over the ridgy upland which in New Mexico is called a mesa, when it is not a desert—and sometimes when it is one—taking her turn with the goats while Vic nursed a strained ankle and a grouch under the mesquite tree by the house. With Pat to help, the herding resolved itself into the exercise of human intelligence over the dog's skill. Pat, for instance, would not of his own accord choose the best grazing for his band, but he could drive them to good grazing once it was chosen for him. So, theoretically, Helen May was exercising her human intelligence; actually she was exercising her muscles mostly. And having an abundance of brain energy that refused to lie dormant, she had plenty of time to think her own thoughts while Pat carried out her occasional orders.

  For one thing, Helen May was undergoing the transition from a mild satisfaction with her education and mentality, to a shamed consciousness of an appalling ignorance and mental crudity. Holman Sommers was unwittingly the cause of that. There was nothing patronizing or condescending in the
attitude of Holman Sommers, even if he did run to long words and scientifically accurate descriptions of the smallest subjects. It was the work he placed before her that held Helen May abashed before his vast knowledge. She could not understand half of what she deciphered and typed for him, and because she could not understand she realized the depth of her benightedness.

  She was awed by the breadth and the scope which she sensed more or less vaguely in The Evolution of Sociology. Holman Sommers quoted freely, and discussed boldly and frankly, such abstruse authors as Descartes, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Comte, Gumplowicz, some of them names she had never heard of and could not even spell without following her copy letter by letter. Holman Sommers seemed to have read all of them and to have weighed all of them and to be able to quote all of them offhand; whereas Schopenhauer was the only name in the lot that sounded in the least familiar to Helen May, and she had a guilty feeling that she had always connected the name with music instead of the sort of things Holman Sommers quoted him as having said or written, she could not make out which.

  Helen May, therefore, was suffering from mental growing pains. She struggled with new ideas which she had swallowed whole, without any previous elementary knowledge of the subject. Her brain was hungry, her life was stagnant, and she seized upon these sociological problems which Holman Sommers had placed before her, and worried over them, and wondered where Holman Sommers had learned so much about things she had never heard of. Save his vocabulary, which wearied her, he was the simplest, the kindest of men, though not kind as her Man of the Desert was kind.