Kid Wolf shook his head. "Please don't thank me, Tip. Yo' see, I always try to make the troubles of the undah dawg, mah troubles. So long as theah are unfohtunates and downtrodden folks in this world, I'll have mah work cut out. I am, yo' might say, a soldier of misfohtune."
"But yo're not goin'?" Tip cried, seeing the Texan swing himself into his saddle.
"I'm just a rollin' stone—usually a-rollin' toward trouble," said the
Texan. "Some time, perhaps, we'll meet again. Adios!"
Kid Wolf swung his hat aloft, and he and his white horse soon blurred into a moving dot on the far sweeps of the Chisholm Trail.
CHAPTER XI
A BUCKSHOT GREETING
"Oh, the cows stampede on the Rio Grande!
The Rio!
The sands do blow, and the winds do wail,
But I want to be wheah the cactus stands!
And the rattlah shakes his ornery tail!"
Kid Wolf sang his favorite verse to his favorite tune, and was happy.
For he was on his beloved Rio.
He had left the Chisholm Trail behind him, and now "The Rollin' Stone" was rolling homeward, and—toward trouble.
The Kid, mildly curious, had been watching a certain dust cloud for half an hour. At first he had thought it only a whirling dervish—one of those restless columns of sand that continually shift over the arid lands. But it was following the course of the trail below him on the desert—rounding each bend and twist of it.