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He repeated his question, and the superintendent’s wife leaned forward, with a laughing aside to me:

“You tenderfoot! Haven’t you learned our brand yet?” And to the boy: “Yes, this is Apache Teju. Do you want to see any one?”

“Boss home yet from Deming?”

“Mr. Williams? I expect him this evening.”

The boy threw himself down full length upon the grass and pressed his face against the cool, green blades.

“Well,” he exclaimed, “it’s pretty fine here, ain’t it? That green down there is just out of sight. I heard there was blue-grass and alfalfa here, but who ‘d have thought it would look so nice?”

“Do you want to see Mr. Williams?”

“I guess it ain’t necessary,” and he sat up again, pressing a handful of grass upon each glowing cheek.

I handed him the candy box and he helped himself daintily with the tongs, saying, “Thank you, ma’am,” with a sidelong glance which let me know that his heart was won to my service from that moment. He put a piece in his mouth, and his face beamed with pleasure.

“This just strikes my gait! ‘T ain’t much like Deming candy, is it? I saw the boss last night in Deming,” he added, turning to Mrs. Williams. “You’re his wife, ain’t you? I thought so, soon as I saw you. He was kidding me about coming out here to be a cowboy, and I told him all right, if he wasn’t running a blaze, I ‘d go him on that. I was to have rode out with him in his buggy, but I was up pretty late last night with the boys, doing the town, and when I got up this morning he was gone. I was n’t going to have him think I ‘d backed out of the bargain, so I says to the conductor, ‘I got a job out at Apache–cowboy–gimme a ride to Whitewater.’ And he says, ‘All right, jump on. You ‘re welcome to a ride on my train whenever you want it.’ So I walked over from Whitewater, and I ‘m ready to go to work to-night if the boss says so. He won’t find me no tenderfoot, you hear me.”

The naive bravado of the child’s speech was irresistible. It won my heart as completely as I had won his, and I straightway emptied my candy box into his hands. “Oh!” he breathed, looking at the heap of dainties with infantile delight. And then he fell upon them with avidity and did not speak another word until the last one had disappeared down his throat.

So that was how the Kid came to live at Apache Teju. He said his name was Guy Silvestre Raymond. But whether a mother’s lips had really bestowed that name upon him, or he had appropriated it to himself out of some blood-and-thunder romance, whose hero he had decided to imitate, name and all, is one of the things that nobody but the Kid will ever know. But it did n’t matter much anyway, for he had always been called Kid, and that name followed him to the ranch, much to his disgust. For he had decided, as he told me one day, that the ladies of the household should call him Guy, and that among the men his name should be “Broncho Bob.”

He was a waif of the railroad. All his life had been spent along its line, blacking boots, selling nuts, candy, papers, on the trains or around the depots of the frontier cities and towns. And he had taken care of himself ever since he could remember. He had reached Deming a few days before in a worse but less picturesque state of dilapidation than that in which he presented himself at Apache Teju. After deciding that he would leave the railroad and become a cowboy, he had scraped together, in Heaven knows what devious ways and by what lucky chances, the apparel of state in which he set forth on his new life.