out, the good roan lessened the distance to the Lone Wolf Crossing
with every coil and turn that he made.

While they fared the Kid sang. He knew but one tune and sang it, as he
knew but one code and lived it, and but one girl and loved her. He was
a single-minded man of conventional ideas. He had a voice like a
coyote with bronchitis, but whenever he chose to sing his song he sang
it. It was a conventional song of the camps and trail, running at its
beginning as near as may be to these words:


Don't you monkey with my Lulu girl
Or I'll tell you what I'll do--


and so on. The roan was inured to it, and did not mind.

But even the poorest singer will, after a certain time, gain his own
consent to refrain from contributing to the world's noises. So the
Kid, by the time he was within a mile or two of Tonia's _jacal_, had
reluctantly allowed his song to die away--not because his vocal
performance had become less charming to his own ears, but because his
laryngeal muscles were aweary.

As though he were in a circus ring the speckled roan wheeled and
danced through the labyrinth of pear until at length his rider knew by
certain landmarks that the Lone Wolf Crossing was close at hand. Then,
where the pear was thinner, he caught sight of the grass roof of the
_jacal_ and the hackberry tree on the edge of the arroyo. A few yards
farther the Kid stopped the roan and gazed intently through the