Marto Cavayso gave to Kit Rhodes the burro-skin belt and a letter from Doña Dolores Terain to the wife of José Perez.
“My work is ended at the hacienda until the mules come back for more guns, and I will take myself to the adobe beyond the corrals for what rest there may be. You are capitan under my general, so this goes to you for the people of the girl he had a heart for. Myself,––I like little their coyote whines and yells. It may be a giving of thanks, or it may be a mourning for dead,––but it sounds to me like an anthem made in hell.”
He referred to the greeting songs of the returned exiles, and the wails for the dead left behind on the trail. The women newly come from Palomitas sat circled on the plaza, and as food or drink was offered each, a portion was poured on the sand as a libation to the ghosts of the lately dead, and the name of each departed was included in the wailing chant sung over and over.
It was a weird, hypnotic thing, made more so by the curious light, yellow and green in the sky, preceding that dark cloud coming slowly with sound of cannonading from the north. Though the sun had not set, half the sky was dark over the eastern sierras.
“The combination is enough to give even a sober man the jim-jams,” agreed Kit. “Doña Jocasta is sick with fear of them, and has gone in to pray as far from the sound as possible. The letter will go to her, and the belt will go to Tula who may thank you another day. This day of the coming back she is not herself.”
“Mother of God! that is a true word. No girl or woman is like that!”
The priest, who had talked with the sick and weary, and listened to their sobs of the degradation of the slave trail, had striven to speak with Tula, who with head slightly drooped looked at him under her straight brows as though listening to childish things.
“See you!” muttered Marto. “That manta must have been garb of some king’s daughter, and no common maid. It makes her a different thing. Would you not think the padre some underling, and she a ruler giving laws?”
For, seated as she was, in a chair with arms, her robe of honor reached straight from her chin to her feet, giving her appearance of greater height than she was possessed of, and the slender banda holding her hair was of the same scarlet of the broideries. Kit remembered calling her a young Cleopatra even in her rags, and now he knew she looked it!
He was not near enough to hear the words of the priest, but with all his energy he was striving to win her to some view of his. She listened in long silence until he ceased.