“Some day it must surely be, Tula.”
“One day it must be,––one day, and prayers are making all the times for that day,” she insisted stolidly. “The old women are talking, and for that day they want him.”
“What day, Tula?”
“The Judas day.”
Kit Rhodes felt a curious creepy sensation of being near an unseen danger, some sleeping serpent basking in the sun, harmless until aroused for attack. He thought of the gentle domestic Valencia, and now this child, both centered on one thought––to sacrifice a traitor on the day of Judas!
“Little girls should make helpful prayers,” he ventured rather lamely, “not vengeance prayers.”
“I was the one to make cry of a woman, when my father went under the earth,” she said. It was her only expression of the fact that she had borne a woman’s share of all their joint toil in the desert,––and he caught her by the shoulder, as she turned away.
“Why, Kid Cleopatra, it isn’t a woman’s work you’ve done at all. It’s a man’s job you’ve held down and held level,” he declared heartily. “That’s why I am counting on you now. I need eyes to watch when I have to be in other places.”
“I watch,” she agreed, “I watch for you, but maybe I make my own prayers also;––all the time prayers.”
“Make one for a straight trail to the border, and all sentries asleep!” he suggested. “We have a pile of yellow rock to get across, to say nothing of our latest puzzling prospect.”