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to the pommel. Then turning the pony's head toward Lincoln, he gave it a resounding slap on its hind quarters and off it went briskly down the cañon road homeward bound. At dusk Old Man Goss was surprised to see the animal standing at the bars of the jail pasture in Lincoln. Billy Burt, thankful enough to get back the horse, which he never expected to see again, preserved the note for years and spoke with a certain touch of kindliness of the Kid ever afterward.

On foot, the Kid struck westward from Padilla's, avoiding the road and keeping well back in the timbered hills where progress was slower but safer. All the while he expected every minute to see a posse clatter by in pursuit, but none appeared. The red sun sank behind the mountains, and in the stillness of dusk he came back to the lonely trail, where he made better speed. It was far in the night and the moon was up when he turned northward and began the long climb through Capitan Gap. Walking was not his habit. All his life he had been half centaur. Encumbered by his leg irons and weighted down by his rifle, two six-shooters, and two heavy, full-charged cartridge belts, travelling over the mountain roads was slow and wearying.

While crossing the pass, he turned off the trail a little north of the crest of the divide and lightened his load by hiding one of his six-shooters in the forks of a juniper tree. He told Sepia Salazar in Las Tablas of this cache and suggested, if he wanted a good gun, that he go and find it. His directions were explicit. The juniper tree stood in the pass, he said, one hundred and twenty steps off the road to the east on the far side of a rocky gully and at the foot of a cliff overgrown with moss and vines. Salazar hunted for the gun and failed to find it. He told some of