“Juana.” Cuthbertson’s voice was very tired.
“Come in, señor.” Her eyes gleamed in the dusk, alert and watchful as a snake’s. Her face slowly puckered into wrinkles of kindness. But Cuthbertson would not enter.
“It’s the sand, Juana,” he said, and now his voice was not quite steady. “It has given up something,—something it had hidden for a long, long time under a yellow rock beyond the last pools. It has spoken, Juana. Perhaps the word is for you, perhaps for someone else. I don’t know. You told me once the sand gripped hard as the grave.”
Old Juana raised her head. “But the hold of the heart is stronger,” she said, in the language Cuthbertson scarcely understood. But her eyes commanded him. Silently he stooped across the hut’s threshold, laying the beautiful veined turquoise at her feet. And with it what had once been a man’s hand.
The sand had dealt with it so long that it was no more terrible than a child’s toy of bone and leather. The night-wind moved it as it lay, lightly as the yellowed leaves of the peach-orchards, on Juana’s mat. A small square agate, bound in gold wire, shifted on the forefinger. Cuthbertson showed it silently.
“It is the Rainmaker’s ring,” said Juana at last. “The word has come.”
Cuthbertson bent his head. “There was nothing more. Just the turquoise in a little hollow and the curved hand,—kind of keeping it. . .”
“He was keeping it for me,” said old Juana quietly.
“There was nothing else. The rest had been taken by the sand, long ago.” His horse shifted restlessly outside, and he moved to leave. He was deadly tired in body and soul, lonely of heart.
The old woman sat motionless, but her eyes glowed. “It is the word,” she said again contentedly. “I have waited a long time. Now I can go.”