sary to dismount so as to lessen the trouble of her
ministrations.

I play no spy; nor do I assume to master the thoughts of any human
heart; but I assert, by the chronicler's right, that before a quarter
of an hour had sped, Sandridge was teaching her how to plaint a
six-strand rawhide stake-rope, and Tonia had explained to him that
were it not for her little English book that the peripatetic /padre/
had given her and the little crippled /chivo/, that she fed from a
bottle, she would be very, very lonely indeed.

Which leads to a suspicion that the Kid's fences needed repairing, and
that the adjutant-general's sarcasm had fallen upon unproductive soil.

In his camp by the water hole Lieutenant Sandridge announced and
reiterated his intention of either causing the Cisco Kid to nibble the
black loam of the Frio country prairies or of haling him before a
judge and jury. That sounded business-like. Twice a week he rode over
to the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio, and directed Tonia's slim,
slightly lemon-tinted fingers among the intricacies of the slowly
growing lariata. A six-strand plait is hard to learn and easy to
teach.

The ranger knew that he might find the Kid there at any visit. He kept
his armament ready, and had a frequent eye for the pear thicket at the
rear of the /jacal/. Thus he might bring down the kite and the
humming-bird with one stone.

While the sunny-haired ornithologist was pursuing his studies the
Cisco Kid was also attending to his professional duties. He moodily
shot up a saloon in a small cow village on Quintana Creek, killed the
town marshal (plugging him neatly in the centre of his tin badge), and
then rode away, morose and unsatisfied. No true artist is uplifted by
shooting an aged man carrying an old-style .38 bulldog.

On his way the Kid suddenly experienced the yearning that all men feel
when wrong-doing loses its keen edge of delight. He yearned for the
woman he loved to reassure him that she was his in spite of it. He
wanted her to call his bloodthirstiness bravery and his cruelty
devotion. He wanted Tonia to bring him water from the red jar under
the brush shelter, and tell him how the /chivo/ was thriving on the
bottle.

The Kid turned the speckled roan's head up the ten-mile pear flat that
stretches along the Arroyo Hondo until it ends at the Lone Wolf
Crossing of the Frio. The roan whickered; for he had a sense of
locality and direction equal to that of a belt-line street-car