“About a year afterward,” continued Captain Malone, “I was walking down a street that crossed the Poydras Market.  An immensely stout, pink-faced lacy in black satin crowded me from the narrow sidewalk with a frown.  Behind her trailed a little man laden to the gunwales with bundles and bags of goods and vegetables.

“It was Kearny—­but changed.  I stopped and shook one of his hands, which still clung to a bag of garlic and red peppers.

“‘How is the luck, old companero?’ I asked him.  I had not the heart to tell him the truth about his star.

“‘Well,’ said he, ‘I am married, as you may guess.’

“‘Francis!’ called the big lady, in deep tones, ’are you going to stop in the street talking all day?’

“‘I am coming, Phoebe dear,’ said Kearny, hastening after her.”

Captain Malone ceased again.

“After all, do you believe in luck?” I asked.

“Do you?” answered the captain, with his ambiguous smile shaded by the brim of his soft straw hat.

VIII

A DOUBLE-DYED DECEIVER

The trouble began in Laredo.  It was the Llano Kid’s fault, for he should have confined his habit of manslaughter to Mexicans.  But the Kid was past twenty; and to have only Mexicans to one’s credit at twenty is to blush unseen on the Rio Grande border.

It happened in old Justo Valdos’s gambling house.  There was a poker game at which sat players who were not all friends, as happens often where men ride in from afar to shoot Folly as she gallops.  There was a row over so small a matter as a pair of queens; and when the smoke had cleared away it was found that the Kid had committed an indiscretion, and his adversary had been guilty of a blunder.  For, the unfortunate combatant, instead of being a Greaser, was a high-blooded youth from the cow ranches, of about the Kid’s own age and possessed of friends and champions.  His blunder in missing the Kid’s right ear only a sixteenth of an inch when he pulled his gun did not lessen the indiscretion of the better marksman.

The Kid, not being equipped with a retinue, nor bountifully supplied with personal admirers and supporters—­on account of a rather umbrageous reputation, even for the border—­considered it not incompatible with his indisputable gameness to perform that judicious tractional act known as “pulling his freight.”

Quickly the avengers gathered and sought him.  Three of them overtook him within a rod of the station.  The Kid turned and showed his teeth in that brilliant but mirthless smile that usually preceded his deeds of insolence and violence, and his pursuers fell back without making it necessary for him even to reach for his weapon.

But in this affair the Kid had not felt the grim thirst for encounter that usually urged him on to battle.  It had been a purely chance row, born of the cards and certain epithets impossible for a gentleman to brook that had passed between the two.  The Kid had rather liked the slim, haughty, brown-faced young chap whom his bullet had cut off in the first pride of manhood.  And now he wanted no more blood.  He wanted to get away and have a good long sleep somewhere in the sun on the mesquit grass with his handkerchief over his face.  Even a Mexican might have crossed his path in safety while he was in this mood.