He got down, with his head and his arms--the left one was lame in
the biceps--above a rock. He made sure that the sun had swung around
so it would not shine on the lenses and betray him by any
heliographic reflection, and focussed his glasses upon the two. He
saw as well as heard Helen May laugh, and he scowled over it. But
mostly he studied the man.
"All right for you, old boy," he muttered. "I don't know who the devil
you are, but I don't like your looks." Which shows how human jealousy
will prejudice a man.
He saw Vic throwing rocks at something which he judged was a snake, and
he saw Helen May rein the pinto awkwardly around, "square herself for
action," as Starr would have styled 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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