The Complete Works of O. Henry

Coralitos bunch.

Near the station was a store; and near the store, scattered among the mesquits and elms, stood the saddled horses of the customers. Most of them waited, half asleep, with sagging limbs and drooping heads. But one, a long-legged roan with a curved neck, snorted and pawed the turf. Him the Kid mounted, gripped with his knees, and slapped gently with the owner's own quirt.

If the slaying of the temerarious card-player had cast a cloud over the Kid's standing as a good and true citizen, this last act of his veiled his figure in the darkest shadows of disrepute. On the Rio Grande border if you take a man's life you sometimes take trash; but if you take his horse, you take a thing the loss of which renders him poor, indeed, and which enriches you not--if you are caught. For the Kid there was no turning back now.

With the springing roan under him he felt little care or uneasiness. After a five-mile gallop he drew it in to the plainsman's jogging trot, and rode northeastward toward the Nueces River bottoms. He knew the country well--its most tortuous and obscure trails through the great wilderness of brush and pear, and its camps and lonesome ranches where one might find safe entertainment. Always he bore to the east; for the Kid had never seen the ocean, and he had a fancy to lay his hand upon the mane of the great Gulf, the gamesome colt of the greater waters.

So after three days he stood on the shore at Corpus Christi, and looked out across the gentle ripples of a quiet sea.

Captain Boone, of the schooner Flyaway, stood near his skiff, which one of his crew was guarding in the surf. When ready to sail he had discovered that one of the necessaries of life, in the parallelogrammatic shape of plug tobacco, had been forgotten. A sailor had been dispatched for the missing cargo. Meanwhile the captain paced the sands, chewing profanely at his pocket store.

A slim, wiry youth in high-heeled boots came down to the water's edge. His face was boyish, but with a premature severity that hinted at a man's experience. His complexion was naturally dark; and the sun and wind of an outdoor life had burned it to a coffee brown. His hair was as black and straight as an Indian's; his face had not yet upturned to the humiliation of a razor; his eyes were a cold and steady blue. He carried his left arm somewhat away from his body, for pearl-handled .45s are frowned upon by town marshals, and are a little bulky when placed in the left armhole of one's vest. He looked beyond Captain Boone at the gulf with the impersonal and expressionless dignity of a Chinese emperor.

'Thinkin' of buyin' that'ar gulf, buddy?' asked the captain, made sarcastic by his narrow escape from a tobaccoless voyage.

'Why, no,' said the Kid gently, 'I reckon not. I never saw it before. I was just looking at it. Not thinking of selling it, are you?'

'Not this trip,' said the captain. 'I'll send it to you C.O.D. when I get back to Buenas Tierras. Here comes that capstanfooted lubber with the chewin'. I ought to've weighed anchor an hour ago.'

'Is that your ship out there?' asked the Kid.

'Why, yes,' answered the captain, 'if you want to call a schooner a ship, and I don't mind lyin'. But you better say Miller and Gonzales, owners, and ordinary plain, Billy-be-damned old Samuel K. Boone, skipper.'

'Where are you going to?' asked the refugee.

'Buenas Tierras, coast of South America--I forgot what they called the country the last time I was there. Cargo--lumber, corrugated iron, and machetes.'

'What kind of a country is it?' asked the Kid--'hot or cold?'

'Warmish, buddy,' said the captain. 'But a regular Paradise Lost for elegance of scenery and be-yooty of geography. Ye're wakened every morning by the sweet singin' of red birds with seven purple tails, and the sighin' of breezes in the posies and roses. And the inhabitants never work, for they can reach out and pick steamer baskets of the choicest hothouse fruit without gettin' out of bed. And there's no Sunday and no ice and no rent and no troubles and no use and no nothin'. It's a great country for a man to go to sleep with, and wait for somethin' to turn up. The bananys and oranges and hurricanes and pineapples that ye eat comes from there.'

'That sounds to me!' said the Kid, at last betraying interest. 'What'll the expressage be to take me out there with you?'

'Twenty-four dollars,' said Captain Boone; 'grub and transportation. Second cabin. I haven't got a first cabin.'

'You've got my company,' said the Kid, pulling out a buckskin bag.

With three hundred dollars he had gone to Laredo for his regular 'blowout.' The duel in Valdos's had cut short his season of hilarity, but it had left him with nearly $200 for aid in the flight that it had made necessary.

'All right, buddy,' said the captain. 'I hope your ma won't blame me for this little childish escapade of yours.' He beckoned to one of the boat's crew. 'Let Sanchez lift you out to the skiff so you won't get your feet wet.'

* * * * *

Thacker, the United States consul at Buenas Tierras, was not yet drunk. It was only eleven o'clock; and he never arrived at his desired state of beatitude--a state wherein he sang ancient maudlin vaudeville songs and pelted his screaming parrot with banana peels--until the middle of the afternoon. So, when he looked up from his hammock at the sound of a slight cough, and saw the Kid standing in the door of the consulate, he was still in a condition to extend the hospitality and courtesy due from the representative of a great nation. 'Don't disturb yourself,' said the Kid, easily. 'I just dropped in. They told me it was customary to light at your camp before starting in to round up the town. I just came in on a ship from Texas.'

'Glad to see you, Mr.--' said the consul.

The Kid laughed.

'Sprague Dalton,' he said. 'It sounds funny to me to hear it. I'm called the Llano Kid in the Rio Grande country.'

'I'm Thacker,' said the consul. 'Take that cane-bottom chair. Now if you've come to invest, you want somebody to advise you. These dingies will cheat you out of the gold in your teeth if you don't understand their ways. Try a cigar?'