“Poor little eaglet!” he said affectionately, “I will take you north to Cap Pike, and someone else who will love you when she hears all this; and in other years, quieter years, we will ride again into Sonora, and–––”
She shook her head against his shoulder, and he stopped short.
“Why, Tula!” he began in remonstrance, but she lifted her hand with a curious gesture of finality.
“Friend of me,” she said in a small voice with an undertone of sad fatefulness, “words do not come today. They told you I am not sleeping on this home trail, and it is true. I kept my mother alive long after the death birds of the night were calling for her––it is so! Also today at the dawn the same birds called above me,––above me! and look!”
They had reached the summit of the valley’s wall and for a half mile ahead the others were to be seen on the trail to Soledad, but it was not there she pointed, but to the northeast where a dark cloud hung over the mountains. Its darkness was cleft by one lance of lightning, but it was too far away for sound of thunder to reach them.
“See you not that the cloud in the sky is like a bird,––a dark angry bird? Also it is over the trail to the north, but it is not for you,––I am the one first to see it! Señor, I will tell you, but I telling no other––I think my people are calling me all the time, in every way I look now. I no knowing how I go to them, but––I think I go!”