“Valencia will be the best one,” said an old woman. “She lost no one by the pale beast, but she knows us every one. Marta, who was wife of Miguel, was always mother and spoke for us to the padre, or anyone, but Marta–––”
She paused and shook her head; some women wept. All knew Marta was one who cried to them for vengeance.
“That is true,” said Valencia. “Marta was the best, but the child of Marta is here, and knows more than we. She has done much,––more than many women. I think the daughter can speak best for the mother, and that the Deliverer will listen.”
Tula had knelt like the others, facing a little shelf on the wall where a carven saint was dimly illuminated by the light of a candle. All the room was very dark, for the dawn was yet but as a gray cloak over the world, and no window let in light.
The girl stood up and turned toward Valencia.
“I will go,” she said, “because it is my work to go when you speak, but the Deliverer will ask for older tongues and I will come back to tell you that.”
Without hesitation she walked out of the door, and the others bent their heads and there was the little click-click of rosary beads, slipping through their fingers in the dusk. Among the many black-shawled huddled figures kneeling on the hard tiles, none noticed the one girl in the corner where shadows were deepest, and whose soft slender hands were muffled in Valencia’s fringes.
Kit stood until he noted that the searching for arms did not include her, and then crossed the patio with Fidelio on his way to the corrals. If the black mare of Doña Jocasta could be gotten to the rear portal, together with the few burros of the older women, she might follow after unnoticed. The adobe wall at the back was over ten feet high and would serve as a shield, and the entire cavalcade would be a half mile away ere they came in range from the plaza.
He planned to manage that the mare be there without asking help of any Indian, and he thought he could do it while the guard was having breakfast. It would be easy for them to suppose that the black was his own. Thus scheming for beauty astray in the desert, he chatted with Fidelio concerning the pilgrimage of the Palomitas women, and the possibility of Rotil’s patience with them, when Tula crossed the patio hurriedly and entered the door of the sala.
The general was finishing his breakfast, while Isidro was crouched beside him rewinding the bandage after a satisfactory inspection of the wound. The swelling was not great, and Rotil, eating cheerfully, was congratulating himself on having made a straight trail to the physician of Mesa Blanca; it was worth a lost day to have the healing started right.