"Oh, no, sir! Impossible. Not at all, sir. If you and your posse will take cover, sir, I'll capture him for you when he comes back, just as I did this one, sir. We are always glad to use the Bar Cross house as a trap and the Bar Cross grub for bait. As you see, sir." "Damn you, Dines, that man isn't coming back!" Johnny considered this for a little. Then he looked up with innocent eyes. "Perhaps you are right, sir," he said thoughtfully. * * * * * Long since, the floods have washed out the Bar Cross horse camp, torn away pens and flat and house, leaving from hill to hill a desolate wash of gravel and boulders--so that no man may say where that poor room stood. Yet youth housed there and hope, honor and courage and loyalty; there are those who are glad it shall shelter no meaner thing. III "I do believe there shall be a winter yet in heaven--and in hell." --_Paradise and the Periscope._ "Realism, _n._ The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads." --_The Devil's Dictionary._ "They sit brooding on a garbage scow and tell us how bad the world smells." --BERTON BRALEY. "Just round the block" is a phrase familiar to you. To get the same effect in the open country you would say "thirty miles" or sixty; and in those miles it is likely there would be no water and no house--perhaps not any tree. Consider now: Within the borders of New Mexico might be poured New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware. Then drop in another small state and all of Chesapeake Bay, and still New Mexico would not be brimful--though it would have to be carried carefully to avoid slopping over. Scattered across this country is a population less than that of Buffalo--half of it clustered in six-mile ribbons along the Rio Grande and the Pecos. Those figures are for to-day. Divide them by three, and then excuse the story if it steps round the block. It was long ago; Plancus was consul then. Some two weeks after the day when Johnny Dines went to horse camp, Charlie See rode northward through the golden September; northward from Rincon, pocket of that billiard table you know of. His way was east of the Rio Grande, in the desperate twisting country where the river cuts through Caballo Mountains. His home was beyond the river, below Rincon, behind Cerro Roblado and Selden Hill; and he rode for a reason he had. Not for the first time; at every farm and clearing he was hailed with greeting and jest. Across the river he saw the yellow walls of Colorado, of old Fort Thorne, deserted Santa Barbara. He came abreast of them, left them behind, came to Wit's End, where the river gnaws at the long bare ridges and the wagon road clings and clambers along the brown hillside. He rode sidewise and swaying, crooning a gay little saddle song; to which Stargazer, his horse, twitched back an inquiring ear.