“Señora, you have only to be yourself, gracious and kind of heart. Also remember this is the first chance in the lands of Soledad to show the natives they have not alone a padrona, but a protecting friend. In days to come it may be a memory of comfort to you.”
Then he mounted, and led the string of horses out to meet the exiles. While she looked after him murmuring, “In days to come?”
And to the padre she said, “I had ceased to think of days to come, for the days of my life had reached the end of all I could see or think. He gives hope even in the midst of sadness,––does the Americano.”
Kit met the band where the trail forked to Palomitas and Mesa Blanca. Some wanted to go direct to their own homes and people, while Marto argued that food and rest and a priest awaited them at Soledad, and because of their dead, they should have prayers.
Tula said nothing. She sat on the sand, and caressed a knife with a slightly curved blade,––a knife not Mexican, yet familiar to Kit, and like a flash he recalled seeing one like it in the hand of Conrad at Granados.
She did not even look up when he halted beside her though the others welcomed with joy the sight of the horses for the rest of the trail.
“Tula!” he said bending over her, “Tula, we come to welcome you,––my horse is for your riding.”
She looked up when he touched her.
“Friend of me,” she murmured wistfully, “you made me put a mark at that place after we met in the first dawn,––so I was knowing it well. Also my mother was knowing,––and it was where she died last night under the moon. See, this is the knife on which Anita died in that place. It is ended for us––the people of Miguel, and the people of Cajame!”
“Tula, you have done wonderful things, many deeds to make the spirit of Miguel proud. Is that not so, my friends?” and he turned to the others, travel-stained, sick and weary, yet one in their cries of the gratitude they owed to Tula and to him, by which he perceived that Tula had, for her own reasons, credited him with the plan of ransom.