it, and fire. By her elation;
artfully suppressed, by the very carelessness with which she shoved the
gun in its holster, he knew that she had hit whatever she shot at. He
caught the tones of Holman Sommers' voice praising her, and he hated the
tones. He watched them come on up to the little house, where they
disappeared at the end where the mesquite tree grew. Sitting in the shade
there, talking, he guessed they were doing, and for some reason he
resented it. He saw Vic lift a rattlesnake up by its tail, and heard him
yell that it had six rattles, and the button was missing.

After that Starr turned his hack on the Basin and began to search
scowlingly the plain. He tried to pull his mind away from Helen May and
her visitor and to fix it upon the would-be assassin. He believed that
the horseman he had seen earlier in the day might be the one, and he
looked for him painstakingly, picking out all the draws, all the dry
washes and arroyos of that vicinity. The man would keep under cover, of
course, in making his getaway. He would not ride across a ridge if he
could help it, any more than would Starr.

Even so, from that height Starr could look down into many of the deep
places. In one of them he caught sight of a horseman picking his way
carefully along the boulder-strewn bottom. The man's back was toward him,
but the general look of him was Mexican. The horse was bay with a rusty
black tail, but there were in New Mexico thousands of bay horses with
black tails, so there was nothing gained there. The rider seemed to be
making toward Medina's ranch, though that was only a guess, since the
arroyo he was following led in that direction at that particular place.
Later it took a sharp turn to the south, and the rider went out of sight
before Starr got so much as a glimpse at his features.

He watched for a few minutes longer, sweeping his glasses slowly to
right and left. He took another look down into the Basin and saw no one
stirring, that being about the time when the plump sister was rolling
up her fancy work and tapering off her conversation to the point of
making her adieu. Starr did not watch long enough for his own peace of
mind. Five more minutes would have brought the plump one into plain
view with her brother and Helen May, and would have identified Holman
Sommers as the escort of a lady caller. But those five minutes Starr
spent in crawling back down the peak on the side farthest from the
Basin, leaving Holman Som