o you get that dope?" Vic eyed her disgustedly, and with a
good deal of condescension. "If you had any sense, you'd knew he was
queer for days before it happened. _I_ noticed it, all right, and if
you didn't--"

Helen May did not say anything at all. She got up and went to her room
and came back with Peter's last, pitiful letter. She gave it to Vic and
sat down again on the arm of the Mission chair and waited, looking at him
from, under her lashes, her head tilted forward.

Vic was impressed, impressed to a round-eyed silence. He knew his dad's
handwriting, and he unfolded the sheet and read what Peter had written.

"I found that letter in--his hand--that morning." Helen May tried to
keep her voice steady. "You mustn't tell any one about it, Vic. They
mustn't know. But you see, he--after doing that to get the money for me,
why--you see, Vic, we've _got_ to go there. And we've got to make good.
We've got to."

There must have been a little of Peter's disposition in Vic, too. He
lay for several minutes staring hard at a patch of sunlight on the
farther wall. I suppose when one is fifteen the ambition to be a movie
star dies just as hard as does later the ambition to be president of
the United States.

"You see, don't you, Vic?" Helen May watched him nervously.

"Well, what do you think I am?" Vic turned upon her with a scowl. "You
might have said it was for your health. You wasn't playing fair. You--you
kept saying it was to raise goats!"

CHAPTER FOUR

STARR WOULD LIKE TO KNOW

Properly speaking Starr did not belong to New Mexico. He was a Texas man,
and, until a certain high official asked him to perform a certain mission
for the Secret Service, he had been a ranger. Puns were made upon his
name when he was Ranger Starr, but he was a ranger no longer, and the
puns had ceased to trouble him. His given name was Chauncy DeWitt;
perhaps that is why even his closest friends called him Starr, it was so
much easier to say, and it seemed to fit him so much better.

Ostensibly, and for a buffer to public curiosity, Starr was acting in the
modest capacity of cattle buyer for a big El Paso meat company.
Incidentally he bought young sheep in season, and chickens from the
Mexican ranchers, and even a bear that had been shot up in the mountains
very early in the spring, before the fat had given place to leanness.
Whatever else Starr did he kept carefully to himself, but his meat buying
was perfectly authentic and