“Vaya!” cried Nicolás, angrily. “Did I not see him, with these my eyes, jump the cliff of two hundred feet yesterday, and with these my hands feel him at the foot that he was dead? Go, with your stories of a stupid, for——”
But here the alguazil, who was one of the group, interrupted: “Lelo has no fool’s eyes, and this thing I shall look into. Since this morning, many things look suspicious. Come, show me where fell thy burro—for to me all these doings are cousins one to another.”
Nicolás, with angry confidence, accompanied the broad-shouldered Indian sheriff, and their companions followed silently. Across the adobe-walled gardens they trudged, and into the sandy “draw,” whose trail led along the cliff and up among the jumble of fallen crags at one side.
“Yonder he jumped off,” said ’Colás, “and fell——” But even then he rubbed his eyes and turned pale. For where he had left the limp, bleeding carcass of poor Paloma only twenty-four hours before, there was now nothing to be seen. Only, upon a rock, were a few red blotches.
“What is this!” demanded the alguazil, sternly. “Hast thou hidden him away? Claro that something fell here—for there is blood and a tuft of hair upon yon stone. But where is the burro?”
“How should I hide him, since he was dead as the rocks? It is witchcraft, I tell you—for see! There are no tracks of him going away, even where the earth is soft. And for the coyotes and wildcats—they would have left his bones. The Gentile I met—he is the witch. First he gave the evil eye to my poor beast, that it killed itself; and now he has flown away in its shape to do other ills.”
“It can be so,” mused the sheriff, gravely; “but in the meantime there is no remedy—I have to answer to the Fathers of Medicine for you who bring such stories of dead burros, but cannot show them. For, I tell you, this has something to say for the deed that was done in the pueblo this morning. Al calaboz!”
Half an hour later, poor Nicolás was squatted disconsolately upon the bare floor of the adobe jail—that simple prison from which no one of the simple prisoners ever thinks to dig out. It is not so much the clay wall that holds them, as the authority of law, which no Pueblo ever yet questioned.
“’Colás’s burro” was soon in every mouth. The strange story of its death and its reappearance to Lelo were not to be mocked at. So it used to be, that the animals were as people; and every one knew that there were witches still who took the forms of brutes and flew by night to work mischief. Perhaps it was some wizard of the Cumanche who thus, by the aid of the evil ones, was avenging the long-haired horse-thieves who had fallen at Tajique.[7] And now Pascual, returning from a ranch across the river, made known that, sitting upon his roof all night to think of the year, he had been aware of a burro that passed down the street even to the house of the war captain; after which he had noticed it no more. Clearly, then!
Some even thought that Lelo should be imprisoned, since he had seen the burro in the morning. And when, searching anew, they found in a splinter of the captain’s door a long, coarse, gray hair, every man looked about him suspiciously. But there was no other clew—save that Francisco, the cleverest of hunters, called the officials to a little corner of the street, where the people had not crowded, and pointed to some dim marks in the sand.