that
if he could once identify the four Mexicans whom Helen May had seen, he
would be a long step ahead. He considered the simple expedient of asking
her to describe them as closely as she could. But since secrecy was the
keynote of his quest, he did not want to rouse her curiosity, and for
purely personal reasons he did want to shield her as far as possible from
any uneasiness or any entanglement in the affair.

Thinking of Helen May in that light forced him to consider what would be
her plight if he and his co-workers failed, if the plan went on to actual
fulfillment, and the Mexican element actually did revolt. Babes, they
were, those two alone there in Sunlight Basin, with a single-shot
"twenty-two" for defense, when every American rancher in three States
considered high-power rifles and plenty of ammunition as necessary in his
home as flour and bacon!

Starr shivered a little and tried to pull his mind away from Helen May
and her helplessness. At any rate, he comforted himself, they had the dog
for protection, the dog who had been trained to jump the corral fence at
any hour of the night if a stranger, and especially a Mexican came
prowling near.

But he and his co-workers must not fail. If intrigue burrowed deep, then
they must burrow deeper.

So thinking, he came just after sundown to where the trail branched in
three directions. One was the direct road to San Bonito, another took a
roundabout way through a Mexican settlement on the river and so came to
the town from another angle, and the third branch wound over the granite
ridge to Malpais. Studying the problem as a whole, picturing the havoc
which an uprising would wreak upon those vast grazing grounds of the
southwest, and how two nations would be embroiled in spite of themselves,
he was hoping that his collaborators, scattered here and there through
the country, men whose names even he did not know, were making more
headway than he seemed to be making here.

He would not know, of course, unless he were needed to assist or to
supplement their work in some way. But he hoped they had found out
something definite, something which the War Department could take hold
of; a lever, as it were, to pry up the whole scheme. He was thinking of
these things, but his mind was nevertheless alert to the little trail
signs which it had become second nature to read. So he saw, there in the
dust of the trail, where a buggy had turned around and gone back whence
it had com