The sheriff did not seem to pay much attention to what Elfigo was saying beyond pulling a pair of handcuffs from his coat pocket, and tossing them to his prisoner—­with the invitation to put them on, Starr knew very well, having himself done the same thing more than once.  Still talking furiously, Elfigo obeyed, and then was invited to climb in beside the sheriff, who stooped and did something with one of Elfigo’s stylishly trousered legs; manacled him to something in the machine, Starr guessed.  From which he also gathered that Elfigo’s remarks must have been pretty strong.

The sheriff started on, ran to where he could turn without upsetting, and backed the car around as though his errand were done.  Quick work it had been.  Evidently Sheriff O’Malley had attended the inquest with a blank warrant in his pocket, for fear Elfigo might take alarm and give them the slip.  He must have been on the way back when he had either seen Elfigo’s car on the Sommers trail, or else had noted where it had turned off and had come up the trail in a purely investigative spirit.  However that might be, he had not let the chance slip.  Which was characteristic of Sheriff O’Malley, essentially a man of action.

Starr should have been glad.  Perhaps he was, though he did not look it as he went back to where Rabbit was browsing on whatever he could get while he waited for his master.  Elfigo in jail even for a few days would be an advantage, Starr believed.  It would set the rest to buzzing, so that he could locate them with less delay.  But at the same time—­

“If it came to a showdown right now, I’d have to take her along with the rest,” he came up squarely against his real problem.  “She’s got it coming; but it’s hell, all the same!”

CHAPTER TWENTY

STARR DISCOVERS THINGS

Starr was sitting on the side of his bed with one boot off and dangling in his hand, and with his thoughts gone journeying out over the mesa and the desert and the granite ridge beyond, to a squatty, two-room adobe shack at the head of Sunlight Basin.  During the days he had been too fully occupied with the work he had to do to dwell much on the miserable fact of Helen May’s duplicity, her guilt of the crime of treason against her native country.  But at night the thought of her haunted him like the fevered ache of a wound too deep to heal quickly.

He swore an abrupt oath as a concrete expression of his mood, and dropped the boot with a thump to the floor.  The word and the action served to swing his thoughts into another channel not much more pleasant, but a great deal more impersonal.

“He’s shore foxy—­that hombre!” he said, thinking of Elfigo Apodaca.

As matters stood that evening, Starr felt that Elfigo had the right to laugh at him and the whole Secret Service.  Elfigo was in jail, yes.  Only that day he had been given his preliminary hearing on the charge of murdering Estan Medina, and he had been remanded without bail to await trial.