“Jesus, Maria, and José!” he muttered in a choked whisper, “one would think the fathers of these devils had never been christened! Sangre de Christo! look at that!”
For in a vivid sheet of lightning they saw a terrible thing.
Tula, on the shoulders of the man, stood up for one wavering instant and with both hands raised high, she flung something far out from her where the sands were firm for all but things of weight. Then her high triumphant call ended sharply in the darkness as she cast herself forward. She died as her sister had died, and on the same knife.
Doña Jocasta stumbled from a horse, and clung to Kit in terror. “Mother of God!” she sobbed. “It is as I said! She is the Eagle of Mexico, and she died clean––with the Serpent under her feet!”
In a dawn all silver and gold and rose after the storm, there was only a trace at the edge of the sand where two horses had carried riders to the treacherous smiling arroya over which a coyote would not cross.
And one of the Indian women of Palomitas tied a reata around the body of her baby son, and sent him to creep out as a turtle creeps to that thing cast by Tula to the women cheated of their Judas.
The slender naked boy went gleefully to the task as to a new game, and spit in the dead face as he dragged it with him to his mother who had pride in him.
It was kicked before the women back over the desert to Soledad, and the boys used it for football that day, and tied what was left of it between the horns of the roped wild bull at the corral. The bellowing of the bull when cut loose came as music to the again placid Indian women of Palomitas. They were ready for the home trail with their exiles. It had been a good ending, and their great holiday at Soledad was over.