“Doña Jocasta, oh!” she breathed as if one of her fairy tales of beauty had come true, and then in Spanish she added the sweet gracious old Castillian welcome, “Be at home with us on your own estate, Señora Perez.”
Jocasta laid her hands on the shoulder of the girl, and looked in the clear gray eyes.
“You are Spanish, Señorita?”
“My grandmother was.”
“Thanks to the Mother of God that you are not a strange Americana!” sighed Jocasta in sudden relief. Then she turned to her American courier and guard and salvation over the desert trails.
“I saw,” she said briefly. “She is as the young sister of me who––who is gone to God! Make yourself her guard forever, Don Pajarito. May you sing many songs together, and have no sorrows.”
After the substantial supper, Kit heard at first hand all the veiled suspicion against himself as voiced in the fragment of old newspaper wrapped around Fidelio’s tobacco, and he and Doña Jocasta spread out the records written by the padre, and signed by Jocasta and the others, as witness of how Philip Singleton met death in the arroya of the cottonwoods.
“It is all here in this paper,” said Jocasta, “and that is best. I can tell the alcalde, yes, but if an––an accident had come to me on the trail, the words on the paper would be the safer thing.”
“But fear on the trail is gone for you now,” said Kit smiling at her across the camp fire. Neither of them had said any word of life at Mesa Blanca or Soledad, or of the work of Tula at the death.
The German had strangled a priest, and escaped, and in ignorance of trails had ridden into a quicksand, and that was all the outer world need know of his end!