The Texan's face, as he swung himself into the saddle, was set and hard.
"Oh, I'm goin' back to the Rio Grande!
The Rio!
For most a yeah, I've been away,
And I'm lonesome now fo' me Old Lone Stah!
The Rio!
Wheah the gila monsters play!"
It was Kid Wolf's second day on the Llano Estacado, and his usual good spirits had returned. His voice rose tunefully and cheerily above the steady drumming of Blizzard's hoofs.
Surely the scene that lay before his eyes could not have aroused his enthusiasm. It was lonely and desolate enough, with its endless sweeps dim against each horizon. The sky, blue, hot and pitiless, came down to meet the land on every hand, making a great circle unbroken by hill or mountain.
So clean-swept was the floor of the vast table-land that each mile looked exactly like another mile. There was not a tree, not a shrub, not a rock to break the weary monotony. It was no wonder that the Spanish padres, who had crossed this enormous plateau long before, had named it the Llano Estacado—the Staked Plains. They had had a good reason of their own. In order to keep the trail marked, they had been compelled to drive stakes in the ground as they went along. Although the stakes had gone long since, the name still stuck.
The day before, the Texan had climbed the natural rock steps that led upward and westward toward the terrible mesa itself, each flat-topped table bringing him nearer the Staked Plains. And soon after reaching the plateau he had found the trail left by a wagon train.
From the ruts left in the soil, Kid Wolf estimated that the outfit must consist of a large number of prairie schooners, at least twenty. The Texan puzzled his mind over why this wagon train was taking such a dangerous route. Where were they bound for? Surely for the Spanish settlements of New Mexico—a perilous venture, at best.
Even on the level plain, a wagon outfit moves slowly, and the Texan gained rapidly. Hourly the signs he had been following grew fresher. Late in the afternoon he made out a blot on the western horizon—a blot with a hazy smudge above it. It was the wagon train. The smudge was dust, dug up by the feet of many oxen.
"They must be loco," Kid Wolf muttered, "to try and cut across The
Terror's territory."
The Texan had heard much of The Terror. And what plainsman of that day hadn't? He was the scourge of the table-lands, with his band of a hundred cutthroats, desperadoes recruited from the worst scum of the border. More than half of his hired killers, it was said, were Mexican outlaws from Sonora and Chihuahua. Some were half-breed Indians, and a few were white gunmen who killed for the very joy of killing.