Tonia Perez, the girl who loved the Cisco Kid, was half Carmen, half Madonna, and the rest--oh, yes, a woman who is half Carmen and half Madonna can always be something more--the rest, let us say, was humming-bird. She lived in a grass-roofed _jacal_ near a little Mexican settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio [65]. With her lived a father or grandfather, a lineal Aztec, somewhat less than a thousand years old, who herded a hundred goats and lived in a continuous drunken dream from drinking _mescal_ [66]. Back of the _jacal_ a tremendous forest of bristling pear, twenty feet high at its worst, crowded almost to its door. It was along the bewildering maze of this spinous thicket that the speckled roan would bring the Kid to see his girl. And once, clinging like a lizard to the ridge-pole, high up under the peaked grass roof, he had heard Tonia, with her Madonna face and Carmen beauty and humming-bird soul, parley with the sheriff's posse, denying knowledge of her man in her soft _mélange_ of Spanish and English. [FOOTNOTE 65: This annotator can find no record of a Lone Wolf Crossing on the Frio, but there are clues that O. Henry had an actual place in mind for the setting of this story. We are told four paragraphs below that this point on the Frio is about 20 miles from the Nueces River. Later we are told that the Arroyo Hondo is near the Lone Wolf Crossing. Hondo Creek enters the Frio in Frio County 5 miles from Pearsall (about 75 miles southwest of San Antonio). At that location the Frio and the Nueces are about 20 miles apart.] [FOOTNOTE 66: mescal--a drug-containing liquor made by distilling fermented agave cactus] One day the adjutant-general of the State, who is, _ex offico_, commander of the ranger forces, wrote some sarcastic lines to Captain Duval of Company X, stationed at Laredo, relative to the serene and undisturbed existence led by murderers and desperadoes in the said captain's territory. The captain turned the colour of brick dust under his tan, and forwarded the letter, after adding a few comments, per ranger Private Bill Adamson, to ranger Lieutenant Sandridge, camped at a water hole on the Nueces with a squad of five men in preservation of law and order. Lieutenant Sandridge turned a beautiful _couleur de rose_ through his ordinary strawberry complexion, tucked the letter in his hip pocket, and chewed off the ends of his gamboge moustache. The next morning he saddled his horse and rode alone to the Mexican settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio, twenty miles away. Six feet two, blond as a Viking, quiet as a deacon, dangerous as a machine gun, Sandridge moved among the _Jacales_, patiently seeking news of the Cisco Kid.