The Kid openly boarded the north-bound passenger train that departed five minutes later.  But at Webb, a few miles out, where it was flagged to take on a traveller, he abandoned that manner of escape.  There were telegraph stations ahead; and the Kid looked askance at electricity and steam.  Saddle and spur were his rocks of safety.

The man whom he had shot was a stranger to him.  But the Kid knew that he was of the Coralitos outfit from Hidalgo; and that the punchers from that ranch were more relentless and vengeful than Kentucky feudists when wrong or harm was done to one of them.  So, with the wisdom that has characterized many great fighters, the Kid decided to pile up as many leagues as possible of chaparral and pear between himself and the retaliation of the 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 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.