The Kid put up his gun, and walked toward the door.  But he turned again and came back to the trembling Thacker, and held up his left hand with its back toward the consul.

“There’s one more reason,” he said slowly, “why things have got to stand as they are.  The fellow I killed in Laredo had one of them same pictures on his left hand.”

Outside, the ancient landau of Don Santos Urique rattled to the door.  The coachman ceased his bellowing.  Senora Urique, in a voluminous gay gown of white lace and flying ribbons, leaned forward with a happy look in her great soft eyes.

“Are you within, dear son?” she called, in the rippling Castilian.

“Madre mia, yo vengo [mother, I come],” answered the young Don Francisco Urique.

IX

THE PASSING OF BLACK EAGLE

For some months of a certain year a grim bandit infested the Texas border along the Rio Grande.  Peculiarly striking to the optic nerve was this notorious marauder.  His personality secured him the title of “Black Eagle, the Terror of the Border.”  Many fearsome tales are on record concerning the doings of him and his followers.  Suddenly, in the space of a single minute, Black Eagle vanished from earth.  He was never heard of again.  His own band never even guessed the mystery of his disappearance.  The border ranches and settlements feared he would come again to ride and ravage the mesquite flats.  He never will.  It is to disclose the fate of Black Eagle that this narrative is written.

The initial movement of the story is furnished by the foot of a bartender in St. Louis.  His discerning eye fell upon the form of Chicken Ruggles as he pecked with avidity at the free lunch.  Chicken was a “hobo.”  He had a long nose like the bill of a fowl, an inordinate appetite for poultry, and a habit of gratifying it without expense, which accounts for the name given him by his fellow vagrants.

Physicians agree that the partaking of liquids at meal times is not a healthy practice.  The hygiene of the saloon promulgates the opposite.  Chicken had neglected to purchase a drink to accompany his meal.  The bartender rounded the counter, caught the injudicious diner by the ear with a lemon squeezer, led him to the door and kicked him into the street.

Thus the mind of Chicken was brought to realize the signs of coming winter.  The night was cold; the stars shone with unkindly brilliancy; people were hurrying along the streets in two egotistic, jostling streams.  Men had donned their overcoats, and Chicken knew to an exact percentage the increased difficulty of coaxing dimes from those buttoned-in vest pockets.  The time had come for his annual exodus to the south.

A little boy, five or six years old, stood looking with covetous eyes in a confectioner’s window.  In one small hand he held an empty two-ounce vial; in the other he grasped tightly something flat and round, with a shining milled edge.  The scene presented a field of operations commensurate to Chicken’s talents and daring.  After sweeping the horizon to make sure that no official tug was cruising near, he insidiously accosted his prey.  The boy, having been early taught by his household to regard altruistic advances with extreme suspicion, received the overtures coldly.