She looked at him quickly, and away again, and went silent. He wondered if it was true that there had been love between these two, and she had been unfaithful. Love and Doña Jocasta were fruitful themes for the imagination of any man.
Valencia was having the great adventure of her life in her journey to Soledad, and she chattered to Tula as a maiden going to a marriage. Three people illustrious in her small world were at once to be centered on the stage of war before her eyes. She told Tula it was a thing to make songs of,––the two men and the most beautiful woman!
When they emerged from the cañon into the wide spreading plain, with the sierras looming high and blue beyond, the eyes of Kit and Tula met, and then turned toward their own little camp in the lap of the mother range. All was flat blue against the sky there, and no indications of cañon or gulch or pocket discernible. Even as they drew nearer to the hacienda, and Kit surreptitiously used the precious field glasses, thus far concealed from all new friends of the desert, he found difficulty in locating their hill of the treasure, and realized that their fears of discovery in the little cañon had been groundless. In the far-away time when the giant aliso had flourished there by the cañon stream, its height might have served to mark the special ravine where it grew, but the lightning sent by pagan gods had annihilated that landmark forever, and there was no other.
The glint of tears shone in the eyes of Tula, and she rode with downcast eyes, crooning a vagrant Indian air in which there were bird calls, and a whimpering long-drawn tremulo of a baby coyote caught in a trap, a weird ungodly improvisation to hear even with the shining sun warming the world.
Kit concluded she was sending her brand of harmony to Miguel and the ghosts on guard over the hidden trail.––And he rather wished she would stop it!
Even the chatter of Valencia grew silent under the spell of the girl’s gruesome intonings,––ill music for her entrance to a new portal of adventure.
“It sounds of death,” murmured Doña Jocasta, and made the sign of the cross. “The saints send that the soul to go next has made peace with God! See, señor, we are truly crossing a place of death as she sings. That beautiful valley of the green border is the sumidero,––the quicksands from hidden springs somewhere above,” and she pointed to the blue sierras. “I think that is the grave José meant for me at Soledad.”
“Nice cheerful end of the trail––not!” gloomed Kit strictly to himself. “That little imp is whining of trouble like some be-deviled prophetess.”
Afterwards he remembered that thought, and wished he could forget!
Blue shadows stretched eastward across the wide zacatan meadows, and the hacienda on the far mesa, with its white and cream adobe walls, shone opal-like in the lavender haze of the setting sun.