real problem. "She's got it
coming; but it's hell, all the same!"

CHAPTER TWENTY

STARR DISCOVERS THINGS

Starr was sitting on the side of his bed with one boot off and dangling
in his hand, and with his thoughts gone journeying out over the mesa and
the desert and the granite ridge beyond, to a squatty, two-room adobe
shack at the head of Sunlight Basin. During the days he had been too
fully occupied with the work he had to do to dwell much on the miserable
fact of Helen May's duplicity, her guilt of the crime of treason against
her native country. But at night the thought of her haunted him like the
fevered ache of a wound too deep to heal quickly.

He swore an abrupt oath as a concrete expression of his mood, and dropped
the boot with a thump to the floor. The word and the action served to
swing his thoughts into another channel not much more pleasant, but a
great deal more impersonal.

"He's shore foxy--that hombre!" he said, thinking of Elfigo Apodaca.

As matters stood that evening, Starr felt that Elfigo had the right to
laugh at him and the whole Secret Service. Elfigo was in jail, yes.
Only that day he had been given his preliminary hearing on the charge
of murdering Estan Medina, and he had been remanded without bail to
await trial.

On the face of it, that looked as though Starr had gained a point. In
reality he felt that he had in some manner played into Elfigo's hands.
Certainly he had not gained anything in the way of producing any buzzing
of the Alliance leaders. Not a Mexican had shown his face at the hearing,
save Luis Medina and his mother, who had been called as witnesses.

Luis had been badly scared but stubborn, insisting that he had heard
Elfigo call Estan from the house just before the shot was fired. The
mother also had been badly frightened, but not at all stubborn. Indeed,
she was not even certain of anything beyond the drear fact that her son
was dead, and that he had fallen with the lamp in his hand, unarmed and
unsuspecting. She was frightened at the unknown, terrible Law that had
brought her there before the judge, and not at anything tangible.

But Luis knew exactly what it was he feared. Starr read that in his eyes
whenever they turned toward the calm, inscrutably smiling Elfigo. Hate
was in the eyes of Luis, but the hate was almost submerged by the terror
that filled him. He shook when he stood up to take the oath. His voice
trembled in spite of him when he spoke; but