That was the worst of it.  Had she been weak she would never have mixed with any political conspiracy; they would not have wanted her, for intrigue has no place for weaklings.  But had she been weak she would never have attracted Starr so deeply, however innocent she might have been.  So his reasoning went round and round in a circle, until he was utterly heartsick with no hope of finding peace.

There was one thing he could do:  it would be tightening the screws of his torture, but he meant to do it for her sake.  He would take her to Fort Bliss himself, shielding her from publicity and humiliation; and he would take charge of Vic, and see that the kid did not suffer too much on account of his sister.

He would make a man of Vic; he never guessed that he was taking up mentally the burden which Peter had laid upon Helen May.  He believed there was good stuff in that kid, and with the right handling he would come out all right.  He would put in a plea to his chief for leniency toward the girl too.  He would say that she was young and inexperienced and that Holman Sommers had probably drawn her into his scheme—­Starr could see how that might easily be—­and that her health was absolutely dependent upon open air.  They couldn’t keep her shut up long; a girl could not do much harm, if the rest of the bunch was convicted.  Maybe the lesson and the scare would be all she needed to pull her back into lawful living.  She was not a hardened adventuress; why, she couldn’t be much over twenty-one or two!  After a while, when she had straightened up, maybe ...

So Starr thought and thought, fighting to keep a little hope alive, to see a little gleam of light in the blackness of his soul.  His head bent, his eyes staring unseeingly at the yellow-brown dust of the trail, he rode along unconscious of everything save the battle raging fiercely within.  He did not know what pace Rabbit was taking; he even forgot that he was on Rabbit’s back.  He did not know that his duty as a man and his man’s love were fighting the fiercest battle of his life, or if he did, he never thought to call it a battle.

There had been one black night in the cabin—­the night before this last one, it was—­when he had considered for a while how he might smuggle Helen May out of the country, suppressing the fact of her complicity.  He planned just how he could put her on a train and “shoot her to Los Angeles,” as he worded it to himself.  How she could take a boat there for Vancouver, and how he could hold back developments here until he knew she was safe.  He figured the approximate cost and the hole it would make in his little savings account.  He thought of everything, even to marrying her before she left, so that he could not be compelled to testify against her, in case she was caught.