Then he smiled again, and drifted into dreams. He would let Bunting travel light to the Rio Seco, and then load him for her as no burro ever was loaded to cross the border! He wondered if she'd tell him again he couldn't hold a foreman's job? He wondered----

And then he felt a light touch on his arm, and turned to see the starlike beauty of Dona Jocasta beside him. Truly the companionship of Dona Jocasta might be a more difficult thing to explain than that of the Indian girl of a slave raid!

Her face was blanched with fear, and her touch brought him back from his vision of G.o.d's country to the tom-tom, and the weird chant, and the thunder of storm coming nearer and nearer in the twilight.

"Senor!" she breathed in terror, "even on my knees in prayer it is not for anyone to shut out this music of demons. Look! Yesterday she was a child of courage and right, but what is she today?"

She pointed to Tula and clung to him, for in all the wild chorus Tula was the leader,--she who had the words of ancient days from the dead Miguel. She sat there as one enthroned draped in that gorgeous thing, fit, as Marto said, for a king's daughter, while the others sat in the plaza or rested on straw and blankets in the corridor looking up at her and shrilling savage echoes to the words she chanted.

"And that animal,--I saw it!" moaned Dona Jocasta. "Mother of G.o.d!

that I should deny a priest who would only offer prayers for that wicked one who is to be tortured on it! Senor, for the love of G.o.d give me a horse and let me go into the desert to that storm, any place,--any place out of sight and sound of this most desolate house!

The merciful G.o.d himself has forsaken Soledad!"

As she spoke he realized that time had pa.s.sed while he read and re-read and dreamed a dream because of the letter. The sun was far out of sight, only low hues of yellow and blue melting into green to show the illumined path it had taken. By refraction rays of copper light reached the zenith and gave momentarily an unearthly glow to the mesa and far desert, but it was only as a belated flash, for the dusk of night touched the edge of it.

And the priest locked in with Conrad had been forgotten by him! At any moment that girl with the key might give some signal for the ceremony, whatever it was, of the death of the German beast!

"Sure, senora, I promise you," he said soothingly, patting her hand clinging to him. "There is my horse in the plaza, and there is Marto's. We will get the padre, and both of you can ride to the little adobe down the valley where Elena's old father lives. He is Mexican, not Indian. It is better even to kneel in prayer there all the night than to try to rest in Soledad while this lasts. At the dawn I will surely go for you. Come,--we will ask for the key."

Together they approached Tula, whose eyes stared straight out seeing none of the dark faces lifted to hers, she seemed not to see Kit who stopped beside her.

"Little sister," he said, touching her shoulder, "the padre waits to be let out of the room of El Aleman, and the key is needed."

She nodded her head, and held up the key.

"Let me be the one," begged Dona Jocasta,--"I should do penance! I was not gentle in my words to the padre, yet he is a man of G.o.d, and devoted. Let me be the one!"

The Indian girl looked up at that, and drew back the key. Then some memory, perhaps that kneeling of Dona Jocasta with the women of Palomitas, influenced her to trust, and after a glance at Kit she nodded her head and put the key in her hand.

"You, senor, have the horses," implored Dona Jocasta, "and I will at once come with Padre Andreas."

"_p.r.o.nto!_" agreed Kit, "but I must get you a _serape_. Rain may fall from that cloud."

She seemed scarcely to hear him as she sped along the patio towards the locked door. Kit entered his own room for a blanket just as she fitted the key in the lock, and spoke the padre's name.

The next instant he heard her screams, and a door slam shut, and as he came out with the blanket, he saw the priest dash toward the portal leading from the patio to the plaza.

He ran to her, lifting her from the tiles where she had been thrown.

"Conrad!" she cried pointing after the flying figure. "There! Quickly, senor, quickly!"

He jerked open the door and looked within, a still figure with the face hidden, crouched by a bench against the wall. In two strides Kit crossed from the door and grasped the shoulder, and the figure propped there fell back on the tiles. It was the dead priest dressed in the clothes of Conrad, and the horror of that which had been a face showed he had died by strangulation under the hands of the man for whom he had gone to pray.

Dona Jocasta ran wildly screaming through the patio, but the Indian voices and the drum prevented her from being heard until she burst among them just as Conrad leaped to the back of the nearest horse.

"El Aleman! El Aleman!" she screamed pointing to him in horror. "He has murdered the padre and taken his robe. It is El Aleman! Your Judas has killed your priest!"

Kit ran for his own horse, but with the quickness of a cat Tula was before him in the saddle, and whirling the animal, leaning low, and her gorgeous _manta_ streaming behind like a banner she sped after the German screaming, "Judas! Judas! Judas of Palomitas!"

And, as in the other chants led by her, the Indian women took up this one in frenzied yells of rage.

The men of the corral heard and leaped to saddles to follow the flying figures, but Kit was ahead,--not much, but enough to be nearest the girl.

Straight as an arrow the fugitive headed for Mesa Blanca, the nearest ranch where a fresh horse could be found, and Dona Jocasta and some of the women without horses stood in the plaza peering after that wild race in the gray of the coming night.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Indian girl was steadily gaining on the German.]

A flash of lightning outlined the three ahead, and a wail of utter terror went up from them all.

"Mother of G.o.d, the canon of the quicksand!" cried Dona Jocasta.

"Tula! Tula! Tula!" shrilled the Indian women.

Tula was steadily gaining on the German, and Kit was only a few rods behind as they dashed down the slight incline to that too green belt in the floor of the brown desert.

He heard someone, Marto he thought, shouting his name and calling "_Sumidero! Sumidero!_" He did not understand, and kept right on.

Others were shouting at Tula with as little result, the clatter of the horses and the rumble of the breaking storm made all a formless chaos of sound.

The frenzied scream of a horse came to him, and another lightning flash showed Conrad, ghastly and staring, leap from the saddle--in the middle of the little valley--and Tula ride down on top of him!

Then a rope fell around Kit's shoulders, pinioning his arms and he was jerked from the horse with a thud that for a s.p.a.ce stunned him into semi-unconsciousness, but through it he heard again the pitiful scream of a dumb animal, and shouts of Marto to the frenzied Indians.

"Ha! Clodomiro, the _reata_! Wait for the lightning, then over her shoulders! Only the horse is caught;--steady and a true hand, boy!

Ai-yi! You are master, and the Mother of G.o.d is your help! Run your horse back,--run, curse you! or she will sink as he sinks! _Sangre de Christo!_ she cuts the _reata_!"

Kit struggled out of the rope, and got to his feet in time to see the flash of her knife as she whirled to her victim. Again and again it descended as the man, now submerged to the waist, caught her. His screams of fear were curdling to the blood, but high above the German voice of fear sounded the Indian voice of triumph, and from the vengeful cry of "Judas! Judas! Judas of the world!" her voice turned sharply to the high clear chant Kit had heard in the hidden canon of the red gold. It was as she said--there would be none of her caste and clan to sing her death song to the waiting ghosts, and she was singing it.

As those weird triumphant calls went out from the place of death every Indian answered them with shouts as of fealty, and in the darkness Kit felt as if among a circle of wolves giving tongue in some signal not to be understood by men.

He could hear the sobs of men and boys about him, but not a measure of that wild wail failed to bring the ever recurring response from the brown throats.

Marto, wet and trembling, cursed and prayed at the horror of it, and moved close to Kit in the darkness.

"Jesus, Maria, and Jose!" he muttered in a choked whisper, "one would think the fathers of these devils had never been christened! _Sangre de Christo!_ look at that!"

For in a vivid sheet of lightning they saw a terrible thing.

Tula, on the shoulders of the man, stood up for one wavering instant and with both hands raised high, she flung something far out from her where the sands were firm for all but things of weight. Then her high triumphant call ended sharply in the darkness as she cast herself forward. She died as her sister had died, and on the same knife.

Dona Jocasta stumbled from a horse, and clung to Kit in terror.

"Mother of G.o.d!" she sobbed. "It is as I said! She is the Eagle of Mexico, and she died clean--with the Serpent under her feet!"

In a dawn all silver and gold and rose after the storm, there was only a trace at the edge of the sand where two horses had carried riders to the treacherous smiling arroya over which a coyote would not cross.

And one of the Indian women of Palomitas tied a _reata_ around the body of her baby son, and sent him to creep out as a turtle creeps to that thing cast by Tula to the women cheated of their Judas.