He rode on, letting Rabbit drop into his poco-poco trail trot.  He carried his head bent forward a little, and his eyebrows were pulled into a scowl of concentrated thought.  It was all very well to suspect Estan Medina and to keep an eye upon him, but there were others who came nearer to the heart of the plot.  He wanted to know who these were, and he believed that if he could once identify the four Mexicans whom Helen May had seen, he would be a long step ahead.  He considered the simple expedient of asking her to describe them as closely as she could.  But since secrecy was the keynote of his quest, he did not want to rouse her curiosity, and for purely personal reasons he did want to shield her as far as possible from any uneasiness or any entanglement in the affair.

Thinking of Helen May in that light forced him to consider what would be her plight if he and his co-workers failed, if the plan went on to actual fulfillment, and the Mexican element actually did revolt.  Babes, they were, those two alone there in Sunlight Basin, with a single-shot “twenty-two” for defense, when every American rancher in three States considered high-power rifles and plenty of ammunition as necessary in his home as flour and bacon!

Starr shivered a little and tried to pull his mind away from Helen May and her helplessness.  At any rate, he comforted himself, they had the dog for protection, the dog who had been trained to jump the corral fence at any hour of the night if a stranger, and especially a Mexican came prowling near.

But he and his co-workers must not fail.  If intrigue burrowed deep, then they must burrow deeper.

So thinking, he came just after sundown to where the trail branched in three directions.  One was the direct road to San Bonito, another took a roundabout way through a Mexican settlement on the river and so came to the town from another angle, and the third branch wound over the granite ridge to Malpais.  Studying the problem as a whole, picturing the havoc which an uprising would wreak upon those vast grazing grounds of the southwest, and how two nations would be embroiled in spite of themselves, he was hoping that his collaborators, scattered here and there through the country, men whose names even he did not know, were making more headway than he seemed to be making here.

He would not know, of course, unless he were needed to assist or to supplement their work in some way.  But he hoped they had found out something definite, something which the War Department could take hold of; a lever, as it were, to pry up the whole scheme.  He was thinking of these things, but his mind was nevertheless alert to the little trail signs which it had become second nature to read.  So he saw, there in the dust of the trail, where a buggy had turned around and gone back whence it had come.  He saw that it had been traveling toward town but had turned and come back.  And looking more closely, he saw that one horse had pulled the buggy.