se he had not seemed able to accomplish
anything with all his riding and all his scanning of the country.

He climbed slowly the last, brown granite ridge, the ridge behind Estan
Medina's house. He would watch the place and see what was going on there.
Then, he supposed he should go back and watch _Las Nuevas_, though his
chief seemed to think that he had discovered enough there for their
purposes. He had sent on the pamphlets, and he knew that when the time
was right, _Las Nuevas_ would be muzzled with a postal law and, he
hazarded, a seizure of their mail.

What he had to do now was to find the men who were working in conjunction
with _Las Nuevas_; who were taking the active part in organizing and in
controlling the Mexican Alliance. So far he had not hit upon the real
leaders, and he knew it, and in his weariness was oppressed with a sense
of failure. They might better have left him in Texas, he told himself
glumly. They sure had drawn a blank when they drew him into the Secret
Service, because he had accomplished about as much as a pup trying to run
down a coyote.

A lizard scuttled out of his way, when he crawled between two boulders
that would shield him from sight unless a man walked right up on him
where he lay--and Starr did not fear that, because there were too many
loose cobbles to roll and rattle; he knew, because he had been twice as
long as he liked in getting to this point quietly. He took off his hat,
telling himself morosely that you couldn't tell his head from a lump of
granite anyway, when he had his hat off, and lifted his glasses to his
aching eyes.

The Medina ranch was just showing signs of awakening after a siesta.
Estan himself was pottering about the corral, and Luis, a boy about
eighteen years old, was fooling with a colt in a small enclosure that had
evidently been intended for a garden and had been permitted to grow up in
weeds and grass instead.

After a while a peona came out and fed the chickens, and hunted through
the sheds for eggs, which she carried in her apron. She stopped to watch
Luis and the colt, and Luis coaxed her to give him an egg, which he was
feeding to the colt when his mother saw and called to him shrilly from
the house. The peona ducked guiltily and ran, stooping, beside a stone
wall that hid her from sight until she had slipped into the kitchen. The
senora searched for her, scolding volubly in high-keyed Mexican, so that
Estan came lounging up to see what was the m