grass by the irrigation
ditch, and a flock of quail raised and fluttered before the quick
rhythmic beat of a loping horse along the trail in the mesquite
thicket.

The slender gallant figure of his rider leaned forward looking,
listening at every turn, and at the forks of the trail where a clump
of squat mesquite and giant sahuarro made a screen, she checked the
horse, and held her breath.

"Good Pat, good horse!" she whispered. "They've got nothing that can
run away from us. We'll show them!"

Then a man's quavering old voice came to her through the winding trail
of the arroya. It was lifted tunefully insistent in an old-time song
of the mining camps:

_Oh, Mexico! we're coming, Mexico!
Our six mule team,
Will soon be seen,
On the trail to Mexico!_

"We made it, Pat!" confided the girl grimly. "We made it. Quiet
now--quiet!"

She peered out through the green mesquite as Captain Pike emerged from
the west arroya on a gray burro, herding two other pack animals ahead
of him into the south trail.

He rode jauntily, his old sombrero at a rakish angle, his eyes bright
with enthusiasm supplied by that which he designated as a morning
"bracer," and his long gray locks bobbed in the breeze as he swayed in
the saddle and droned his cheerful epic of the trail:

_A--and when we've been there long enough,
And back we wish to go,
We'll fill our pockets with the shining dust
And then leave Mexico!
Oh--Mexico!
Good-bye my Mexico!
Our six mule team will then be seen
On the trail from Mexico._

"Hi there! you Balaam--get into the road and keep a-going, you ornery
little rat-tailed son-of-a-gun! Pick up your feet and travel, or I'll
yank out your back bone and make a quirt out of it! For----"

_My name was Captain Kidd as I sailed
As I sailed,
My name was Captain Kidd,
As I sailed!
My name was Captain Kidd
And most wickedly I di-i-id
All holy laws forbid
As I sailed!_

The confessor of superlative wickedness droned his avowal in
diminishing volume as the burros pattered along the white dust of the
valley road, then the curve to the west hid them, and all was silence
but for the rustle of the wind in