“And that looks mighty darn queer,” said Starr, “if it was just accidental.  But if a fellow wanted to take to the rocks to cover his trail, why, he couldn’t pick a better place than this.  She’s a dandy ridge and a dandy way to get up on her, if that’s what’s wanted.”  Starr looked at his watch and gave up all hope of catching the next eastbound train, if that had really been his purpose.  He lifted his hat and drew his fingers across his forehead where the perspiration stood in beads, resettled the hat at an angle to shade his face from the glare of the sun, ran two fingers cursorily between the cinch and Rabbit’s sweaty body, picked up the stirrup, thrust in his toe and eased himself up into the saddle; and his mind had not consciously directed a single movement.

“Well, they’ve left one mark behind ’em that fair hollers,” he stated, in so satisfied a tone that Rabbit turned his head and looked back at him inquiringly.  Starr, you must know, was not given to satisfied tones when he and Rabbit were enduring the burden of heat and long miles.  “And you needn’t give me that kinda look, neither.  Take a look at them tire tracks, you ole knot-head.  Them’s Silvertown cords, and they ain’t equipping jitneys with cord tires—­not yet.  Why, yo’re whole carcass ain’t worth the price uh one tire, let alone four, you old sheep.  You show me the car in this country that’s sportin’ Silvertowns all around, and I’ll show you—­”

Just what he would show, Starr did not say, because he did not know.  But there was something there which might be called a mystery, and where there was mystery there was Starr, working tirelessly on the solution.  This might be a trivial thing; but until he knew beyond all doubt that it was trivial, Starr pushed other matters, such as a young woman afraid of a horned toad, out of his mind that he might study the puzzle from all possible angles.

CHAPTER SIX

“DARN SUCH A COUNTRY!”

Helen May stood on the knobby, brown rock pinnacle that formed the head of Sunlight Basin and stared resentfully out over the baked desert and the forbidding hills and the occasional grassy hollows that stretched away and away to the skyline.  So clear was the air that every slope, every hollow, every acarpous hilltop lay pitilessly revealed to her unfriendly eyes, until the sheer immensity of distance veiled its barrenness in a haze of tender violet.  The sky was blue; deeply, intensely blue, with little clouds like flakes of bleached cotton floating aimlessly here and there.  In a big, wild, unearthly way it was beautiful beyond any words which human beings have coined.

Helen May felt its bigness, its wildness, perhaps also its beauty, though the beauties of the desert land do not always appeal to alien eyes.  She felt its bigness and its wildness; and she who had lived the cramped life of the town resented both, because she had no previous experience by which to measure any part of it.  Also, she summed up all her resentment and her complete sense of bafflement at its bigness in one vehement sentence that lacked only one word of being a curse.