Helen May looked up at him with relief struggling through the apathy of utter weariness.  “No, but I might as well be.  I’ll never be able to get home alive, anyhow.”  She shook the hoe-handle menacingly at a hesitating goat and quite suddenly collapsed upon the nearest rock, and began to cry; not sentimentally or weakly or in any other feminine manner known to Starr, but with an angry recklessness that was like opening a safety valve.  Helen May herself did not understand why she should go along for half a day calmly enough, and then, the minute this man rode up and spoke to her sympathetically, she should want to sit down and cry.

“I just—­I’ve been walking since one o’clock!  If I had a gun, I’d shoot every one of them.  I just—­I think goats are simply damnable things!”

Starr turned and looked at the animals disapprovingly.  “They sure are,” he assented comfortingly.  “Where you trying to take ’em—­or ain’t you?” he asked, with the confidence-inviting tone that made him so valuable to those who paid for his services.

“Home, if you can call it that!” Helen May found her handkerchief and proceeded to wipe the tears and the dust off her cheeks.  She looked at Starr more attentively than at first when he had been just a human being who seemed friendly.  “Oh, you’re the man that stopped at the spring.  Well, you know where I live, then.  I was hunting these; they wandered off and Vic couldn’t find them yesterday, so I—­it was just accident that I came across them.  I followed some tracks, and it looked to me as if they’d been driven off.  There were horse tracks.  That’s what made me keep going—­I was so mad.  And now they won’t go home or anywhere else.  They just want to run around every which way.”

Starr looked up the arroyo, hesitating.  On the edge of San Bonito he had picked up the track of Silvertown cord tires, and he had followed it to the mouth of this arroyo.  From certain signs easy for an experienced man to read, he had known the track was fairly fresh, fresh enough to make it worth his while to follow.  And now here was a girl all tired out and a long way from home.

“Here, you climb onto Rabbit.  He’s gentle when he knows it’s all right, and I won’t stand for him acting up.”  Starr swung off beside her.  “I’ll help get the goats home.  Where’s your dog?”

“I haven’t any dog.  The man we bought the goats from wanted to sell me one, to help herd them, he said.  But he asked twenty-five dollars for it—­I suppose he thought because I looked green I’d stand for that!—­and I wouldn’t be held up that way.  Vic and I have nothing to do but watch them.  You—­you mustn’t bother,” she added half-heartedly.  “I can get them home all right.  I’m rested now, and there’s a moon, you know.  Really, I can’t let you bother about it.  I know the way.”

“Put your foot in the stirrup and climb on.  You, Rabbit, you stand still, or I’ll beat the—­”

“Really, you mustn’t think, because I cried a little bit—­”