San Bonito was no city and it did not take long to make the round of the garages.  No one had seen Miera that day, and Starr’s disappointment was quite noticeable, though misunderstood.  Not a car in any of the four garages sported Silvertown cords.

At the last garage an arc light flared over the wide doorway.  Starr, feeling pretty well disgusted, was leaving when he saw a tire track alongside the red, gasoline filling-pump.  He stopped and, under cover of lighting his cigarette, he studied the tread.  Beyond all doubt the car he wanted had stopped there for gas.  But the garage man was a Mexican, so Starr dared not risk a question or show any interest whatever in the car whose tires left those long-lined imprints to tell of its passing.  He puffed at his cigarette until he had studied the angle of the front-wheel track and decided that the car must have been headed south, and that it had made a rather short turn away from the pump.

This was puzzling for a while.  The driver might have been turning around to go back the way he had come.  But it was more likely that he had driven into the cross street to the west.  He strolled over that way, but the light was too dim to trace automobile tracks in the dust of the street so he went back to the adobe cabin and put in the next hour oiling and cleaning and polishing a 25-35 carbine which he meant to give Helen May, and in filling a cartridge belt with shells.

He sat for some time turning two six-shooters over in his hands, trying to decide which would please her most.  One was lighter than the other, with an easier trigger action; almost too easy for a novice, he told himself.  But it had a pearl handle with a bulldog carved on the side that would show when the gun was in its holster.  She’d like that fancy stuff, he supposed.  Also he could teach her to shoot straighter with that light “pull.”  But the other was what Starr called a sure-enough go-getter.

He finally decided, of course, to give her the fancy one.  For Vic he would have to buy a gun; an automatic, maybe.  He’d have to talk coyotes pretty strong, in order to impress it upon them that they must never go away anywhere without a gun.  Good thing there was a bounty on coyotes; the money would look big to the kid, anyway.  It occurred to him further that he could tell them there was danger of running into a rabid coyote.  Rabies had caused a good deal of trouble in the State, so he could make the danger plausible enough.

He did not worry much over frightening the girl.  She had nerve enough.  Think of her tackling that ranch proposition, with just that cub brother to help!  When Starr thought of that slim, big-eyed, smiling girl in white fighting poverty and the white plague together out there on the rim of the desert, a lump came up in his throat.  She had nerve enough—­that plucky little lady with the dull-gold hair, and the brown velvet eyes!—­more nerve than he had where she was concerned.