“Don’t put down your gun yet,” he said abruptly, standing beside the door with his hat in his hand, as though his visit would be very short.  “You can shoot me if you want to, but that’s about all the leeway I can give you.  I rounded up the revolution leaders last night.  They’re likely at Fort Bliss by now, so you can take your choice between handing me a bullet, or going along with me to Fort Bliss.  Because if I live, that’s where I’ll have to take you.  And,” he added as an afterthought, “I don’t care much which it is.”

Helen May stood with her chin tilted down, and stared at him from under her eyebrows.  She did not speak for a minute, and Starr leaned back against the closed door with his arms folded negligently and his hat dangling from one hand, waiting her decision.  He stared back at her, somberly apathetic.  He had spoken the simple truth when he said he did not care which she decided to do.  He had come to the limit of suffering, it seemed to him.  He could look into her tawny brown eyes now without any emotion whatever.

“You don’t smell drunk,” said Helen May suddenly and very bluntly, “and you don’t look crazy.  What is the matter with you, Starr of the desert?  Is this a joke, or what?”

“It didn’t strike me as any joke,” Starr told her passionlessly.  “Thirteen of them I rounded up.  Holman Sommers was the head of the whole thing.  Elfigo Apodaca is in jail, held for the shooting of Estan Medina.  Luis Medina is in jail too, held as a witness and to keep Apodaca’s men from killing him before he can testify in court.  I hated to see the kid tangled up with it—­and I hate to see you in it.  But that don’t give me any license to let you off.  You’re under arrest.  I’m a Secret Service man, sent here to prevent the revolution that’s been brewing all spring and summer.  I guess I’ve done it, all right.”  He stared at her with growing bitterness in his eyes.  His hurt began dully to ache again.  “Helen May, what in God’s name did you tangle up with ’em for?” he flashed in a sudden passion of grief and reproach.

Helen May’s chin squared a little; but she who had not screamed when she found her father dead in his bed; she who had read his letter without whimpering held her voice quiet now, though womanlike she answered Starr’s question with another.

“What makes you think I am tangled up with it?  What reason have you got for connecting me with such a thing?”

A stain of anger reddened Starr’s cheek bones, that had been pale.  “What reason?  Well, I’ll tell you.  In the office of Las Nuevas, in that little, inside room with the door opening out of a closet to hide it, where I got my first real clue, I found two sheets of paper with some strong revolutionary stuff written in English.  Also I found a pamphlet where the same stuff had been printed in Spanish.  I kept that writing, and I kept the pamphlet.  I’ve got it now.  I’d know the writing anywhere I saw it, and I saw a sample of it here in this very room, when the wind blew those papers off your desk.”