nal directions to the vaqueros, turned his roan in the same
direction.

"Can't ride back with you, Cap, for I'm taking a little _pasear_
around past Herrara's rancheria. I want to take a look at that bunch
of colts and size up the water there. I've a hunch they had better be
headed up the other valley to the Green Springs tank till rains
come."

Captain Pike jogged off alone after some audible and highly colored
remarks concerning range bosses who assumed the power of the Almighty
to be everywhere the same day. Yet as he watched the younger man
disappear over the gray-green range he smiled tolerantly for, after
all, that sort of a hustler was the right sort of partner for a
prospecting trip.

The late afternoon was a golden haze under a metal blue sky; afar to
the east, sharp edges of the mountains cut purple zig-zags into the
salmon pink of the horizon. The rolling waves of the ranges were
bathed in a sea of rest, and now and then a bird on the mesquite along
an arroya, or resting on branch of flaring occotilla would give out
the foreboding call of the long shadows, for the heart of the day had
come and gone, and the cooler air was waking the hidden things from
siesta.

Kit Rhodes kept the roan at a steady lope along the cattle trail,
drinking in the refreshing sweetness of the lonely ranges after hours
of dust and heat and the trampling horse herds of the corrals.
Occasionally he broke into songs of the ranges, love songs, death
laments, and curious sentimental ditties of love and wars of old
England as still crooned in the cabins of southern mountains.

_I had not long been married,
A happy, happy bride!
When a handsome trooper captain
Stepped up to our bedside,
"Rise up! rise up! young man," he said,
"And go along with me,
In the low, low lands of Holland
To fight for liberty._"

The ancient song of the sad bride whose lover proved false in the
"low, low lands of Holland" trailed lugubriously along the arroya in a
totally irrelevant way, for the singer was not at all sad. He was
gaily alert, keen-eyed and watchful, keeping time to the long lope
with that dubious versification.

"And they're at it again pretty close to the 'low, low lands of
Holland,' Pardner," he confided to the horse. "And when you and I make
a stake you'll go on pasture, I'll hit the breeze for Canada or some