He thus avoided all detail as to the loads the pack animals were to carry, and the written word was a safe mystery to the Indian. He was making no definite plans, but was learning all possibilities with a mind prepared to take advantage of the most promising.
Thus the late afternoon wore on in apparent restful idleness after the hard trail. The boys secured their little allowance of beans and salt, and corn for planting, but lingered after the good supper of Valencia, a holiday feast compared with their own sketchy culinary performance in the jacal of the far fields. They scanned the trail towards Palomitas, and then the way down the far western valley, evidently loath to leave until their friend Clodomiro should arrive, and Isidro expected him before sunset.
But he came later from towards Soledad, a tall lad with fluttering ribbands of pink and green from his banda and his elbows, and a girdle of yellow fluttering fringed ends to the breeze,––all the frank insignia of a youth in the market for marriage. He suggested a gay graceful bird as he rode rapidly in the long lope of the range. His boy friends of the planted fields went out to meet him at the corral, and look after his horse while he went in to supper. He halted to greet them, and then walked soberly across the plaza where pepper trees and great white alisos trailed dusk shadows in the early starlight.
“What reata held you?” asked Isidro. “Has Soledad grown a place for comradeship?”
“No, señor,” said the lad passing into the dining room where two candles gave him light in the old adobe room, “it is comradeship we do not need, but it is coming to us.”
He seated himself on the wooden bench and his grandmother helped him from a smoking plate of venison. He looked tired and troubled, and he had not even taken note that a stranger was beside Isidro in the shadows.
“What nettle stings you, boy?” asked his grandfather sarcastically, and at that he looked up and rose to his feet at sight of Rhodes.
“Your pardon, señor, I stumbled past like a bat blind in the light,” he muttered, and as he met Kit’s eyes and recognized him his face lit up and his white teeth gleamed in a smile.
“The saints are in it that you are here again, señor!” he exclaimed, “and you came on this day when most needed.”
“Eat and then tell your meaning,” said Isidro, but Clodomiro glanced toward the kitchen, and then listened for the other boys. They were laughing down at the corral. Clodomiro’s horse had thrown one of them.