lace as quickly as he could go in the
dark and still keep his movements quiet. It was back in that arroyo where
he had first discovered traces of the car he now felt sure had come from
the yard of _Las Nuevas_.

He remembered that on the side next him the arroyo had deep-cut banks
that might get him a nasty fall if he attempted them in the dark, so he
took a little more time for the trip and kept to the rougher, yet safer,
granite-covered ridge. Once, just once, he caught the glow of dimmed
headlights falling on the slope farthest from him. He hurried faster,
after that, and so he climbed down into the arroyo at last, near the
point where he had climbed out of it that other day.

He went, as straight as he could go in the dark, to the place where he
had first seen the tracks of the Silvertown cords. He listened, straining
his ears to catch the smallest sound. A cricket fiddled stridently, but
there was nothing else.

Starr took a chance and searched the ground with a pocket flashlight. He
did not find any fresh tracks, however. And while he was standing in the
dark considering how the hills might have carried the sound deceptively
to his ear, and how he may have been mistaken, from somewhere on the
other side of the ridge came the abrupt report of a gun. The sound was
muffled by the distance, yet it was unmistakable. Starr listened, heard
no second shot, and ran back up the rocky gulch that led to the ridge he
had just left, behind Medina's house.

He was puffing when he reached the place where he had lain between the
two boulders, and he stopped there to listen again. It came,--the sound
he instinctively expected, yet dreaded to hear; the sound of a woman's
high-keyed wailing.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

"IS HE THEN DEAD--MY SON?"

Starr hurried down the bluff, slipping, sliding, running where the way
was clear of rocks. So presently he came to the stone wall, vaulted over
it, and stopped beside the tragic little group dimly outlined in the
house yard just off the porch.

"My son--my son!" the old woman was wailing, on her knees beside a long,
inert figure lying on its back on the hard-packed earth. Back of her the
peona hovered, hysterical, useless. Luis, half dressed and a good deal
dazed yet from sleep and the suddenness of his waking, knelt beside his
mother, patting her shoulder in futile affection, staring down
bewilderedly at Estan.

So Starr found them. Scenes like this were not so unusual in his lif