; for he had a sense of
locality and direction equal to that of a belt-line street-car horse;
and he knew he would soon be nibbling the rich mesquite grass at the
end of a forty-foot stake-rope while Ulysses rested his head in
Circe's straw-roofed hut.

More weird and lonesome than the journey of an Amazonian explorer is
the ride of one through a Texas pear flat. With dismal monotony and
startling variety the uncanny and multiform shapes of the cacti lift
their twisted trunks, and fat, bristly hands to encumber the way. The
demon plant, appearing to live without soil or rain, seems to taunt
the parched traveller with its lush grey greenness. It warps itself a
thousand times about what look to be open and inviting paths, only to
lure the rider into blind and impassable spine-defended "bottoms of
the bag," leaving him to retreat, if he can, with the points of the
compass whirling in his head.

To be lost in the pear is to die almost the death of the thief on the
cross, pierced by nails and with grotesque shapes of all the fiends
hovering about.

But it was not so with the Kid and his mount. Winding, twisting,
circling, tracing the most fantastic and bewildering trail ever picked
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