other seaport, and get one whack at the Boche brown rat on my own if
official America is too proud to fight, for

_Oh-h! oh-h! Oh-h!
In the low, low lands of Holland,
My love was false to me!_"

Then, after long stretches of sand dunes, mesquite thickets,
occasional wide canons where _zacatan_ meadows rippled like waves of
the sea in the desert air, he swung his horse around a low hill and
came in sight of the little adobe of Herrara, a place of straggly
enclosures of stakes and wattles, with the corral at the back.

Another rider came over the hill beyond the corral, on a black horse
skimming the earth. Rhodes stared and whistled softly as the black
without swerving planted its feet and slid down the declivity by the
water tank, and then, jumping the fence below, sped to the little
_ramada_ before the adobe where its rider slid to the ground amid a
deal of barking of dogs and scattering of children.

And although Kit had never seen the rider before, he had no difficulty
as to recognition, and on a sudden impulse he whistled the meadow-lark
call loudly enough to reach her ears.

She halted at the door, a bundle in her hand, and surveyed the
landscape, but failed to see him because he at that moment was back of
a clump of towering prickly pear. And she passed on into the shadows
of the adobe.

"That's the disadvantage of being too perfect, Pardner," he confided
to the roan, "she thinks we are a pair of birds."

He turned at the corner of the corral and rode around it which took
him back of the house and out of range from the door, but the dogs set
up a ki-yi-ing, and a flock of youngsters scuttled to the corner of
the adobe, and stared as children of the far ranges are prone to stare
at the passing of a traveler from the longed-for highways of the
world.

The barking of the dogs and scampering of the children evidently got
on the nerves of the black horse left standing at the vine-covered
_ramada_, for after a puppy had barked joyously at his heels he leaped
aside, and once turned around kept on going, trotting around the
corral after the roan.

Rhodes saw it but continued on his way, knowing he could pick it up on
his return, as the Ojo Verde tank was less than a mile away. A boy
under the _ramada_ gave one quick look and then fled, a flash of brown
and a red flapping end of a sash, up the canoncita where the home
spring was shadowed by a large mesquite