Mexicans to one's credit at
twenty is to blush unseen on the Rio Grande border.

It happened in old Justo Valdos's gambling house. There was a poker
game at which sat players who were not all friends, as happens often
where men ride in from afar to shoot Folly as she gallops. There
was a row over so small a matter as a pair of queens; and when the
smoke had cleared away it was found that the Kid had committed
an indiscretion, and his adversary had been guilty of a blunder.
For, the unfortunate combatant, instead of being a Greaser, was a
high-blooded youth from the cow ranches, of about the Kid's own age
and possessed of friends and champions. His blunder in missing the
Kid's right ear only a sixteenth of an inch when he pulled his gun
did not lessen the indiscretion of the better marksman.

The Kid, not being equipped with a retinue, nor bountifully supplied
with personal admirers and supporters--on account of a rather
umbrageous reputation, even for the border--considered it not
incompatible with his indisputable gameness to perform that
judicious tractional act known as "pulling his freight."

Quickly the avengers gathered and sought him. Three of them overtook
him within a rod of the station. The Kid turned and showed his teeth
in that brilliant but mirthless smile that usually preceded his
deeds of insolence and violence, and his pursuers fell back without
making it necessary for him even to reach for his weapon.

But in this affair the Kid had not felt the grim thirst for
encounter that usually urged him on to battle. It had been a purely
chance row, born of the cards and certain epithets impossible for
a gentleman to brook that had passed between the two. The Kid had
rather liked the slim, haughty, brown-faced young chap whom his
bullet had cut off in the first pride of manhood. And now he wanted
no more blood. He wanted to get away and have a good long sleep
somewhere in the sun on the mesquit grass with his handkerchief over
his face. Even a Mexican might have crossed his path in safety while
he was in this mood.

The Kid openly boarded the north-bound passenger train that departed
five minutes later. But at Webb, a few miles out, where it was
flagged to take on a traveller, he abandoned that manner of escape.
There were telegraph stations ahead; and the Kid looked askance at
electricity and steam. Saddle and spur were his rocks of safety.

The man whom he had shot was a stranger to him. But the Kid kne