He then sought out one of the older men to learn who could be counted on to round up the stray cattle of the ranges. After that he went at once back to the ranch house, and did not even speak to Tula again. There was nothing to indicate that she was the principal object of his visit, or that she had acquired a guardian who was taking his job seriously.
Later in the day she was brought to Mesa Blanca by an elderly Indian woman of her mother’s clan, and settled in the quiet Indian manner in the new dwelling place. Valencia was full of pity for the girl of few years who had yet known the hard trail, and had mourned alone for her dead.
There was a sort of suppressed bustle about la casa de Mesa Blanca that day, dainties of cookery prepared with difficulty from the diminished stores, and the rooms of the iron bars sprinkled and swept, and pillows of wondrous drawnwork decorated the more pretentious bed. To Tula it was more of magnificence than she had ever seen in her brief life, and the many rooms in one dwelling was a wonder. She would stand staring across the patio and into the various doorways through which she hesitated to pass. She for whom the wide silences of the desert held few terrors, hesitated to linger alone in the shadows of the circling walls. Kit noted that when each little task was finished for Valencia, she would go outside in the sunlight where she had the familiar ranges and far blue mountains in sight.
“Here it makes much trouble only to live in a house,” she said pointing to the needlework on a table cover. “The bowls of food will make that dirty in one eating, and then what? Women in fine houses are only as mares in time of thrashing the grain––no end and no beginning to the work,––they only tread their circle.”
“Right you are, sister,” agreed Kit, “they do make a lot of whirligig work for themselves, all the same as your grandmothers painting pottery that smash like eggshells. But life here isn’t all play at that, and there may be something doing before sleep time tonight. I went after you so I would have a comrade I knew would stick.”
She only gazed at him without question.
“You remember, Tula, the woman led by the padre at Soledad?”
She nodded silently.
“It may be that woman is captive to the same men who took your people,” he said slowly watching her, “and it may be we can save her.”
“May it also be that we can catch the man?” she asked, and her eyes half closed, peered up at him in curious intensity. “Can that be, O friend?”