He stopped to make sure of that and to search for footprints.  But those he found were indistinct, blurred partly by the looseness of the sand and partly by the sparse grass that grew along the trail there, because the buggy had turned in a hollow.  He went on a couple of rods, and he saw where an automobile had also come to this point and had turned and gone back toward town, or rather, it had swung sharply around and taken the trail which led through the Mexican settlement; but he guessed that it had gone back to town, for all that.  And the tire marks were made by Silvertown cords.

Starr stopped and looked back to where the buggy tracks were faintly outlined in the dust of the hollow, and he spoke aloud his thought:  “You’d think, just to see him and talk to him, that Estan Medina assays one hundred per cent, satisfied farmer.  He’s sure some fox—­that same greaser!” After that he shook Rabbit into a long, distance-eating lope for town.

Night came with its flaring forerunners of purple and crimson and all the gorgeous blendings of the two.  By the time he reached San Bonito, the stars were out, and the electric lights were sputtering on certain street corners.  Starr had rented a small adobe cabin and a corral with a shed on the outskirts of town where his movements might be unobserved.  He did not always use these, but stopped frequently at a hotel with a garrulous landlord, and stabled his horse at a certain livery which he knew to be a hotbed of the town’s gossip.  In both places he was a privileged patron and was the recipient of many choice bits of scandal whispered behind a prudent palm, with a wink now and then to supply the finer shades of meaning.  But to-night he chose the cabin and the corral sandwiched between a transfer company’s warehouse and a steam laundry that had been closed by the sheriff.  The cabin fronted on a street that was seldom used, and the corral ran back to a dry arroyo that was used mainly as a dump for the town’s tin cans and dead cats and such; not a particularly attractive place but secluded.

He turned Rabbit into the corral and fed him, went in and cooked himself some supper, and afterwards, in a different suit and shoes and a hat that spoke loudly of the latest El Paso fad in men’s headgear, he strolled down to the corner and up the next street to the nearest garage.  Ostensibly he was looking for one Pedro Miera, who had a large sheep ranch out east of San Bonito, and who always had fat sheep for sale.  Starr considered it safe to look for Miera, whom he had seen two or three days before in El Paso just nicely started on a ten-day spree that never stopped short of the city jail.

Since it was the dull hour between the day’s business and the evening’s pleasure, Starr strolled the full length of the garage and back again before any man spoke to him.  He made sure that no car there had the kind of tires he sought, so he asked if Miera and his machine had showed up there that day, and left as soon as the man said no.