ou won't have to beg very hard. I was just
going to put on the coffee. So you make yourself at home, and I'll have
breakfast in a few minutes. Vic, for gracious sake, get up! Here's
company already. And you'll have to let out the goats. Pat can keep them
together awhile, but he can't open the gate, and I'm busy."

Starr heard the prodigious yawn of the awakening Vic, who slept
behind a screen in the kitchen, bedrooms being a superfluous luxury
in which Johnny Calvert had not indulged himself. Starr followed her
to the doorway.

"I'll go let out the goats," he offered. "I want to take off the bridle
anyway, so Rabbit can feed around a little." He let himself out into the
whooping wind, feeling, for some inexplicable reason, depressed when he
had expected to feel only relief.

"Lord! I'm getting to the point where anything that ain't accompanied by
a chart and diagrams looks suspicious to me. She's got more hawse sense
than I gave her credit for, that's all. She musta seen through my yarnin'
about them mad coyotes. She's pretty cute, coming to the door with her
six-gun just like a real one! And never letting on to me that she had it
right handy. I must be getting off my feed or something, the way I take
things wrong. Now her being up late--I'm just going to mention how far
off I saw her light burning--and how late it was. I'll see what she says
about it."

But he did nothing of the kind, and for what he considered a very good
reason. The wind was blowing in eddying gusts, of the kind that seizes
and whirls things; such a gust swooped into the room when he opened the
door, seized upon some papers which lay on her writing desk, and sent
them clear across the room.

Starr hastily closed the door and rescued the papers where they had
flattened against the wall; and he wished he had gone blind before he saw
what they were. A glance was all he gave, at first--the involuntary
glance which one gives to a bit of writing picked up in an odd place--but
that was enough to chill his blood with the shock of damning
enlightenment. A page of writing, it was, fine, symmetrical, hard to
decipher--a page of Holly Sommers' manuscript; you know that, of course.

But Starr did not know. He only knew the writing matched the pages of
revolutionary stuff he had found in the office of _Las Nuevas._ There was
no need of comparing the two; the writing was unmistakable. And he
believed that Helen May was the writer. He believed it when he glanc