The Kid was twenty-five, looked twenty; and a careful insurance
company would have estimated the probable time of his demise at,
say, twenty-six. His habitat was anywhere between the Frio and
the Rio Grande. He killed for the love of it--because he was
quick-tempered--to avoid arrest--for his own amusement--any reason that
came to his mind would suffice. He had escaped capture because he could
shoot five-sixths of a second sooner than any sheriff or ranger in the
service, and because he rode a speckled roan horse that knew every
cow-path in the mesquite and pear thickets from San Antonio to
Matamoras.

Tonia Perez, the girl who loved the Cisco Kid, was half Carmen, half
Madonna, and the rest--oh, yes, a woman who is half Carmen and half
Madonna can always be something more--the rest, let us say, was
humming-bird. She lived in a grass-roofed _jacal_ near a little
Mexican settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio [65]. With
her lived a father or grandfather, a lineal Aztec, somewhat less
than a thousand years old, who herded a hundred goats and lived in a
continuous drunken dream from drinking _mescal_ [66]. Back of the
_jacal_ a tremendous forest of bristling pear, twenty feet high at its
worst, crowded almost to its door. It was along the bewildering maze of
this spinous thicket that the speckled roan would bring the Kid to see
his girl. And once, clinging like a lizard to the ridge-pole, high up
under the peaked grass roof, he had heard Tonia, with her Madonna face
and Carmen beauty and humming-bird soul, parley with the sheriff's
posse, denying knowledge of her man in her soft _mélange_ of Spanish
and English.

[FOOTNOTE 65: This annotator can find no record of a Lone Wolf
Crossing on the Frio, but there are clues that O.