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 coming to the door with a six-shooter hidden against her skirt.  There was that handwriting, to which Starr would unhesitatingly have sworn as being the same as on the pages he had found in the office of Las Nuevas.  The writing was unmistakable:  fine, even, symmetrical as print, yet hard to decipher; slanting a little to the left instead of the right.  He had studied too often the pages in his pocket not to recognize it at a glance.

Most damning evidence of all the evidence against her were two or three words which his eyes had picked from the context on the page uppermost in his hand.  He had become familiar with those words, written in that peculiar chirography.  “Justice... submission ... ruling ...”  He had caught them at a glance, though he did not know how they were connected, or what relation they bore to the general theme.  Political bunk, his mind tagged it therefore, and had no doubt whatever that he was right.

“She’s got brown eyes and blond hair, and that looks like mixed blood,” he reminded himself suddenly, after he had sat for a long while staring down at the house.  “How do I know her folks aren’t Spanish or something?  How do I know anything about her?  I just swallowed what she handed out—­like a damn’ fool!”

Just after noon, when the wind had shown some sign of dying down to a more reasonable blow, Helen May came forth in her riding skirt and a Tam o’ Shanter cap and a sweater, with a package under her arm—­a package of manuscript which she had worked late to finish and was now going to deliver.

She got the pinto pony which Vic had just ridden sulkily down to the corral and left for her, and she rode away down the trail, jolting a good deal in the saddle when the pinto trotted a few steps, but apparently well pleased with herself.

Starr watched until she turned into the main trail that led toward San Bonito.  Then, when he was reasonably sure of the direction she meant to take, he hurried down to where Rabbit waited, mounted that long-suffering animal and followed, using short cuts and deep washes that would hide him from sight, but keeping Helen May in view most of the time for all that.