street to the nearest garage.
Ostensibly he was looking for one Pedro Miera, who had a large sheep
ranch out east of San Bonito, and who always had fat sheep for sale.
Starr considered it safe to look for Miera, whom he had seen two or three
days before in El Paso just nicely started on a ten-day spree that never
stopped short of the city jail.

Since it was the dull hour between the day's business and the evening's
pleasure, Starr strolled the full length of the garage and back again
before any man spoke to him. He made sure that no car there had the kind
of tires he sought, so he asked if Miera and his machine had showed up
there that day, and left as soon as the man said no.

San Bonito was no city and it did not take long to make the round of the
garages. No one had seen Miera that day, and Starr's disappointment was
quite noticeable, though misunderstood. Not a car in any of the four
garages sported Silvertown cords.

At the last garage an arc light flared over the wide doorway. Starr,
feeling pretty well disgusted, was leaving when he saw a tire track
alongside the red, gasoline filling-pump. He stopped and, under cover of
lighting his cigarette, he studied the tread. Beyond all doubt the car he
wanted had stopped there for gas. But the garage man was a Mexican, so
Starr dared not risk a question or show any interest whatever in the car
whose tires left those long-lined imprints to tell of its passing. He
puffed at his cigarette until he had studied the angle of the front-wheel
track and decided that the car must have been headed south, and that it
had made a rather short turn away from the pump.

This was puzzling for a while. The driver might have been turning around
to go back the way he had come. But it was more likely that he had driven
into the cross street to the west. He strolled over that way, but the
light was too dim to trace automobile tracks in the dust of the street so
he went back to the adobe cabin and put in the next hour oiling and
cleaning and polishing a 25-35 carbine which he meant to give Helen May,
and in filling a cartridge belt with shells.

He sat for some time turning two six-shooters over in his hands, trying
to decide which would please her most. One was lighter than the other,
with an easier trigger action; almost too easy for a novice, he told
himself. But it had a pearl handle with a bulldog carved on the side that
would show when the gun was in its holster. She'd like that fan