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ar, twenty feet high at its worst, crowded almost to its door. It was along the bewildering maze of this spinous thicket that the speckled roan would bring the Kid to see his girl. And once, clinging like a lizard to the ridge-pole, high up under the peaked grass roof, he had heard Tonia, with her Madonna face and Carmen beauty and humming-bird soul, parley with the sheriff's posse, denying knowledge of her man in her soft /melange/ of Spanish and English. One day the adjutant-general of the State, who is, /ex offico/, commander of the ranger forces, wrote some sarcastic lines to Captain Duval of Company X, stationed at Laredo, relative to the serene and undisturbed existence led by murderers and desperadoes in the said captain's territory. The captain turned the colour of brick dust under his tan, and forwarded the letter, after adding a few comments, per ranger Private Bill Adamson, to ranger Lieutenant Sandridge, camped at a water hole on the Nueces with a squad of five men in preservation of law and order. Lieutenant Sandridge turned a beautiful /couleur de rose/ through his ordinary strawberry complexion, tucked the letter in his hip pocket, and chewed off the ends of his gamboge moustache. The next morning he saddled his horse and rode alone to the Mexican settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio, twenty miles away. Six feet two, blond as a Viking, quiet as a deacon, dangerous as a machine gun, Sandridge moved among the /Jacales/, patiently seeking news of the Cisco Kid. Far more than the law, the Mexicans dreaded the cold and certain vengeance of the lone rider that the ranger sought. It had been one of the Kid's pastimes to shoot Mexicans "to see them kick": if he demanded from them moribund Terpsichorean feats, simply that he might be entertained, what terrible and extreme penalties would be certain to follow should they anger him! One and all they lounged with upturned palms and shrugging shoulders, filling the air with "/quien sabes/" and denials of the Kid's acquaintance. But there was a man named Fink who kept a store at the Crossing--a man of many nationalities, tongues, interests, and ways of thinking. "No use to ask them Mexicans," he said to Sandridge. "They're afraid to tell. This /hombre/ they call the Kid--Goodall is his name, ain't it?--he's been in my store once or twice. I have an idea you might run across him at--but I guess I don't keer to say, myself. I'm two seconds
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