"And they're at it again pretty close to the 'low, low lands of Holland,' Pardner," he confided to the horse. "And when you and I make a stake you'll go on pasture, I'll hit the breeze for Canada or some other seaport, and get one whack at the Boche brown rat on my own if official America is too proud to fight, for
_Oh-h! oh-h! Oh-h! In the low, low lands of Holland, My love was false to me!_"
Then, after long stretches of sand dunes, mesquite thickets, occasional wide cañons where _zacatan_ meadows rippled like waves of the sea in the desert air, he swung his horse around a low hill and came in sight of the little adobe of Herrara, a place of straggly enclosures of stakes and wattles, with the corral at the back.
Another rider came over the hill beyond the corral, on a black horse skimming the earth. Rhodes stared and whistled softly as the black without swerving planted its feet and slid down the declivity by the water tank, and then, jumping the fence below, sped to the little _ramada_ before the adobe where its rider slid to the ground amid a deal of barking of dogs and scattering of children.
And although Kit had never seen the rider before, he had no difficulty as to recognition, and on a sudden impulse he whistled the meadow-lark call loudly enough to reach her ears.
She halted at the door, a bundle in her hand, and surveyed the landscape, but failed to see him because he at that moment was back of a clump of towering prickly pear. And she passed on into the shadows of the adobe.
"That's the disadvantage of being too perfect, Pardner," he confided to the roan, "she thinks we are a pair of birds."
He turned at the corner of the corral and rode around it which took him back of the house and out of range from the door, but the dogs set up a ki-yi-ing, and a flock of youngsters scuttled to the corner of the adobe, and stared as children of the far ranges are prone to stare at the passing of a traveler from the longed-for highways of the world.
The barking of the dogs and scampering of the children evidently got on the nerves of the black horse left standing at the vine-covered _ramada_, for after a puppy had barked joyously at his heels he leaped aside, and once turned around kept on going, trotting around the corral after the roan.