“A padre does not bow his head to help Indian woman. Caballeros do not lift them up.”
“Well I reckon Don José Perez is home on a visit, and brought his family. A queer time! Other ranch folks are getting their women north over the border for safety.”
“Don José not bring woman to Soledad––ever. He take them away. His men take them away.”
It was the first reference she had made to the slavers since they had entered the cañon, though she knew that each pile of nuggets was part of the redemption money for those exiles of whom she did not speak.
But she worked tirelessly until Kit would stop her, or suggest some restful task to vary the steady grind of carrying, pounding, or washing the quartz. He had ordered her to make two belts, that each of them might carry some of the gold hidden under their garments. She had a nugget tied in a corner of her manta, and other small ones fastened in her girdle, while in the belt next her body she carried all he deemed safe to weight her with, probably five pounds. At any hint of danger she would hide the belt and walk free.
His own belt would carry ten pounds without undue bulkiness. And over three hundred pounds of high grade gold was already safely hidden near the great rock with the symbols of sun and rain marking its weathered surface.
“A fair hundred thousand, and the vein only scratched!” he exulted. “I was sore over losing the job on Billie’s ranch,––but gee! this looks as if I was knocked out in the cold world to reach my good luck!”
In a blue dusk of evening they left the camp behind and started over the trail, after Tula had carefully left fragments of food on the tomb of Miguel, placed there for the ghosts who are drawn to a comrade.
Kit asked no questions concerning any of her tribal customs, since to do so would emphasize the fact that they were peculiar and strange to him, and the Indian mind, wistfully alert, would sense that strangeness and lose its unconsciousness in the presence of an alien. So, when she went, after meals, to offer dregs of the soup kettle or bones of the burro, she often found a bunch of desert blossoms wilting there in the heat, and these tributes left by Kit went far to strengthen her confidence. It was as if Miguel was a live partner in their activities, never forgotten by either. So they left him on guard, and turned their faces toward the outer world of people.
Knowing more than he dare tell the girl his mind was considerably occupied with that woman at Soledad, for military control changed over night in many a province of Mexico in revolutionary days, and the time at the hidden mine might have served for many changes.