“I heard what you said through the window, Mrs. Lane,” he said.  “I was just going down in my pocket for a Christmas present for your husband.  But I’ve left one for you, instead.  It’s in the room to your right.”

“Oh, thank you, kind Santa Claus,” said Rosita, brightly.

Rosita went into the room, while Santa Claus stepped into the cooler air of the yard.

She found no one in the room but Madison.

“Where is my present that Santa said he left for me in here?” she asked.

“Haven’t seen anything in the way of a present,” said her husband, laughing, “unless he could have meant me.”

The next day Gabriel Radd, the foreman of the X O Ranch, dropped into the post-office at Loma Alta.

“Well, the Frio Kid’s got his dose of lead at last,” he remarked to the postmaster.

“That so?  How’d it happen?”

“One of old Sanchez’s Mexican sheep herders did it!—­think of it! the Frio Kid killed by a sheep herder!  The Greaser saw him riding along past his camp about twelve o’clock last night, and was so skeered that he up with a Winchester and let him have it.  Funniest part of it was that the Kid was dressed all up with white Angora-skin whiskers and a regular Santy Claus rig-out from head to foot.  Think of the Frio Kid playing Santy!”

XXI

A LITTLE LOCAL COLOUR

I mentioned to Rivington that I was in search of characteristic New York scenes and incidents—­something typical, I told him, without necessarily having to spell the first syllable with an “i.”

“Oh, for your writing business,” said Rivington; “you couldn’t have applied to a better shop.  What I don’t know about little old New York wouldn’t make a sonnet to a sunbonnet.  I’ll put you right in the middle of so much local colour that you won’t know whether you are a magazine cover or in the erysipelas ward.  When do you want to begin?”

Rivington is a young-man-about-town and a New Yorker by birth, preference and incommutability.

I told him that I would be glad to accept his escort and guardianship so that I might take notes of Manhattan’s grand, gloomy and peculiar idiosyncrasies, and that the time of so doing would be at his own convenience.

“We’ll begin this very evening,” said Rivington, himself interested, like a good fellow.  “Dine with me at seven, and then I’ll steer you up against metropolitan phases so thick you’ll have to have a kinetoscope to record ’em.”

So I dined with Rivington pleasantly at his club, in Forty-eleventh street, and then we set forth in pursuit of the elusive tincture of affairs.

As we came out of the club there stood two men on the sidewalk near the steps in earnest conversation.

“And by what process of ratiocination,” said one of them, “do you arrive at the conclusion that the division of society into producing and non-possessing classes predicates failure when compared with competitive systems that are monopolizing in tendency and result inimically to industrial evolution?”