all at sea, but he
felt that he must get away somewhere and think the whole thing out before
he went crazy.

He left the Basin, rode around behind it and, leaving Rabbit in the
thicket where he had left him the day before, he toiled up the pinnacle
and sat down in the shelter of a boulder pile where he would be out of
the wind as well as out of sight, and where he could still stare somberly
down at the cabin.

And there he faced his trouble bravely, and at the same time he
fulfilled his duty toward his government by keeping a watch over the
place that seemed to him then the most suspicious place in the country.
The office of _Las Nuevas_, even, was not more so, as Starr saw things
then. For if _Las Nuevas_ were the distributing point for the propaganda
literature, this cabin of Helen May's seemed to be the fountain head.

First of all, and going back to the beginning, how did he really _know_
that her story was true? How, for instance, did he know that her father
had not been one of the heads of the conspiracy? How did he know that her
father--it might even be her husband!--was dead? He had simply accepted
her word, as a matter of course, because she was a young woman, and more
attractive than the average young woman. Starr was terribly bitter, at
that point in his reasoning, and even felt certain that he hated all
women. Well, then, her reason for being in the neighborhood would bear a
lot of looking into.

Then there was that automobile that had passed where he had found her and
her goats, that evening. Was it plausible, he asked himself, that she had
actually walked over there? The machine had returned along the same
trail, running by moonlight with its lights out. Might it not have been
coming to pick her up? Only he had happened along, and she had let him
walk home with her, probably to keep him where she could watch him!

There was that shot at him from the pinnacle behind her cabin. There was
her evident familiarity with firearms, though she professed not to own a
gun. There was the man who had been down there with her, not more than an
hour after he had left her with a bullet burn across his arm. Starr saw
now how that close conversation might easily have been a conference
between her and the man who had shot at him.

There was the light in her window at one o'clock in the morning, and the
machine with dimmed headlights making toward her place. There was her
evident caution against undesirable callers, her