Ok, two things, I guess, though I notice you are a lot keener to address issues that I have not brought up than the ones I do. The reason I don't include Hoyt's Red Legs is that they did not exist at the time. Brown was executed in 1859, Hoyt did not arrive in Kansas until late 1861, and he did not become captain of the Red Legs until late 1862 (or early '63, depending on whom you believe, I personally prefer '62). So "Hoyt's Red Legs" could not have been involved in any conspiracy 3 years before he assumed the captaincy. Secondly, since "we would all be interested" in such contacts, I take it that they do not exist, or at least that no one knows what/if they were. That puts your original contention that the Secret Six "were among the conspirators in this plot also" in a different light, no? There is no evidence that the Secret Six had anything to do with the Kansas plot. I contend that they did not.
"if Stephen Z. Starr reported to us correctly."
He may or may not have, since Hoyt is not his strong point. In fact, Starr makes a number of errors that might lead a careful reader to wonder how much research he did on Hoyt. For example, on page 78, he makes two errors, a big one - George Hoyt was not "the son of a Boston Publisher," his father was a doctor. And a little one - he was not from "Atholl," but Athol. And while the latter may seem like a "quibble," in this case it is instructive. Hoyt's father, also named George, had an interesting medical practice in Athol when Hoyt was young. In fact, if you take the Athol Historical Trail today, you'll find that stop #5 is his old house, which was a stop on the Underground Railroad. His dad was one of the more adamant and early Massachusetts abolitionists, who used to have to carry rocks in his carriage to beat away all his admirers [/sarcasm]. He also won the first case of its kind in Massachusetts where a slave was freed, in his case a 10-year-old boy named Anderson who lived with Hoyt and went to school with him. That's why Hoyt was trusted as a spy at Charlestown in the first place. Hoyt's Uncle Henry, the publisher, never lived in Athol, but moved to Boston directly from Deerfield, which was the home town of someone else whose name you may recognize (John Brown knew it): Major David Starr Hoyt.
That mistake (oversight, whatever) leads him to make another mistake in assuming that Hoyt's sickness was faked (i.e. the doctor was "hoodwinked," Starr's word) and that he left the Seventh because his "heroics" (again Starr's word) were no longer needed. The truth is that Hoyt was sick almost the whole time the Seventh was away from Kansas (See Fox, "Early History of the Seventh"). When he arrived at Leavenworth, "he was so ill his black servant had to carry his emaciated seventy-five pound body ashore." (Matthews and Lindberg, "Better off in Hell," North & South, May, 2002). He was also sick after the Price campaign - which is why he was breveted a general instead of being run out of the service like Jennison, Laing, and Swain. He was also sick when he was thrown in prison in 1862, where he could have resigned if that was his intention the whole time as Starr implies, and was also dead before he was 40, though it was a decade after the war. But the point is he didn't NEED abolitionist heroics; he knew guys like Sanborn and Le Barnes personally and had spend many late nights in 1860 Boston as an armed guard for Wendell Phillips, none of which is even hinted at by Starr. I don't think one can rely on Starr to discover what Hoyt did or didn't do, or why.
"Quibble with me in print, and I mean in books and articles." Yes, go back to my hidey-hole. Sorry to have taken up your important time.