Lelo dropped the point of his heavy irrigating hoe and stood with chin dented upon the rude handle, looking intently to the east. Around his bare ankles the rill from the acéquia[1] eddied a moment and then sucked through the gap in the little ridge of earth which bounded the irrigating bed. The early sun was yellow as gold upon the crags of the mesa[2]—that league-long front of ragged cliffs whose sandstones, black-capped by the lava of the immemorial Year of Fire, here wall the valley of the Rio Grande on the west. Where a spur of the frowning Kú-mai runs out is a little bay in the cliffs; and here the outermost fields of Isleta were turning green with spring. The young wheat swayed and whispered to the water, whose scouts stole about amid the stalks, and came back and called their fellows forward, and spread hither and yon, till every green blade was drinking and the tide began to creep up the low boundaries at either side. Up at the sluice gate a small but eager stream was tumbling from the big, placid ditch, and on it came till it struck the tiny dam which closed the furrow just beyond Lelo, and, turning, stole past him again to join the rest amid the wheat. The irrigating bed, twenty feet square, filled and filled, and suddenly the gathered puddle broke down a barrier and came romping into the next bed without so much as saying “By your leave.” And here it was not so friendly; for, forgetting that it had come only to bring a drink, it went stampeding about, knocking down the tender blades and half covering them with mud. At sound of this, Lelo seemed suddenly to waken, and lifting with his hoe the few clods which dammed the furrow, he dropped them into the first gap, and jumping into the second bed repaired its barrier also with a few strokes. Then he let in a gentler stream from the furrow.
“Poco, and I should have lost a bed,” he said to himself, goodnaturedly. Blas always took things easy, and I presume that is the reason no one ever called him anything but Lelo[3]—“Slow-poke”—for Indian boys are as given to nicknames as are any others, and the mote had stuck to him ever since its invention. He was rather slow—this big, powerful boy, with a round, heavy chin and a face less clear-cut than was common in the pueblo. Old ’Lipe had taken to wife a Navajo captive, and all could see that the boy carried upon his father’s strong frame the flatter, more stolid features of his mother’s nomad people.
But now the face seemed not quite so heavy; for again he was looking toward the pueblo and bending his head as one who listens for a far whisper. There it came again—a faint, faint air which not one of us could have heard, but to this Indian boy it told of shouts and mingled wails.
“What will be?” cried Lelo, stamping his hoe upon the barrier, and with unwonted fire in his eyes. “For surely I hear the voice of women lamenting, and there are men’s shouts as in anger. Something heavy it will be—and perhaps I am needed.” Splashing up to the ditch, he shut the gate and threw down his hoe, and a moment later was running toward Isleta with the long, heavy, tireless stride that was the jest of the other boys in the rabbit hunt, but left Lelo not so very far behind them after all.
In the pueblo was, indeed, excitement enough. Little knots of the swart people stood here and there, talking earnestly but low; in the broad, flat plaza were many hurrying to and fro; and in the street beyond was a great crowd about a house whence arose the long, wild wails of mourners.
“What is, tio Diego?” asked Lelo, stopping where a number of men stood in gloomy silence. “What has befallen? For even in the milpa[4] I heard the cries, and came running to see.”
“It is ill,” answered the old man he had addressed as uncle. “It seems that Those Above are angry with us! For this morning the captain of war finds himself dead in bed—and scalped! And no tracks of man were about his door.”
“Ay, all is ill!” groaned a short, heavy-set man, in a frayed blanket. “For yesterday, coming from the llano[5] with my burro,[6] I met a stranger—a bárbaro. And, blowing upon Paloma, he bewitched the poor beast so that it sprang off the trail and was killed at the bottom of the cliff. It lacked only that! Last month it was the raid of the Cumanche; and, though we followed and slew many of the robbers and got back many animals, yet mine were not found, and this was the very last that remained to me.”
“Pero, Don ’Colás!” cried Lelo, “your burro I saw this very morning as I went to the field before the sun. Paloma it was, with the white face and the white hind foot—for do I not know him well? He was passing through the bushes under the cliffs at the point, and turned to look at me as I crossed the fields below.”