fluttered about the white oleanders.
He smiled in comical self-derision as he noticed the moths, but tossed
away the cigarette and followed the light.

When Captain Pike indulged the following morning in sarcastic comment
over Kit's defection, the latter only laughed at him.

"Shirk business? Nothing doing. I was strictly on the job listening to
local items on treasure trails instead of powwowing with you all over
the latest news reports from the Balkans. Soon as my pocket has a
jingle again, I am to get to the French front if little old U. S.
won't give me a home uniform, but in the meantime Dona Luz Moreno is
some reporter if she is humored, and I mean to camp alongside every
chance I get. She has the woman at the _cantina_ backed off the map,
and my future Spanish lessons will be under the wing of Dona Luz. Me
for her!"

"Avaricious young scalawag!" grunted Pike. "You'd study African
whistles and clicks and clacks if it blazed trail to that lost gold
deposit! Say, I sort of held the others out there in front thinking I
would let you get acquainted with little Billie, and you waste the
time chinning about death in the desert, and dry camps to that
black-and-tan talking machine."

Kit only laughed at him.

"A record breaker of a moon too!" grumbled the old man. "Lord!--lord!
at your age I'd crawled over hell on a rotten rail to just sit
alongside a girl like Billie--and you pass her up for an old hen with
a mustache, and a gold trail!"

Kit Rhodes laughed some more as he got into the saddle and headed for
the Granados corral, singing:

_Oh--I'll cut off my long yellow hair
To dress in men's array,
And go along with you, my dear
Your waiting man to be!_

He droned out the doleful and incongruous love ballad of old lands,
and old days, for the absurd reason that the youth of the world in his
own land beat in his blood, and because in the night time one of the
twinkling stars of heaven had dropped down the sky and become a girl
of earth who touched a guitar and taught him the words of a Spanish
serenade,--in case he should find a Mexican sweetheart along the
border!

For to neither of the young, care-free things, had come a glimmer of
fore-vision of the long tragic days, treasure trails and desert
deaths, primitive devotions and ungodly vengeance, in which the
threads of their own lives would be entangled before those two ever
heard the mus