All day the horses kept their heads turned down hill. They snipped the sparse grass—eyes and ears and muzzles stretched toward distant hollows—all instincts fixed upon unseen water. Elbert didn’t trust the sorrel, not even to tether him, but kept a hand on his bridle-rein. Once he dozed and was awakened from a thirst dream by the sound of horses sucking in water from a stony stream.

... Mexico with her quaint, gentle ways—a plaintive singing voice ‘carved out of starlight’—but underneath—violence. Men fell to killing each other. Just so much of all this killing a man could stand, and no more. How had Bart stood it for so long? Bart wasn’t like that, himself. He hadn’t even roughed it with the soldier of the keys in the Arecibo prison—not even in that moment of fierce danger and haste! ... and that easy flowing voice of coolness and laughter and daring, but how had Bart dared to put Palto out of his misery?

Elbert pondered a long time, finally remembering how he had felt the need of carrying Bart deeper and deeper into the house, as if he had known all the time there was an inner room. When he reached there and had laid his burden down—a sudden sense of peace had come over him. What was the meaning of that? With his eyelids closed he saw a light shining through alabaster. Yes, he had met one who would know the meaning and could answer this.... But what was the meaning of the power that had seemed to come to him to make the señorita understand with so few words?...

Cross and white flower—Spanish-faced girl standing back against the wall... Elbert dozed again, and the inner room of El Relicario and the still flowered room of Tucson softly, magically folded into one. It seemed quite easy and natural.

A grim day, his nerve at lowest ebb, nothing of the lift or glow he had known in moments of last night’s riding with Bart. Would they ever ride together again? Was Bart lying dead now in that inner room?

Fenceless foothills of Sonora—ages in a day! He didn’t feel quite sane, riding down to the creek in the dusk at last. He couldn’t hold his mind to thought of danger, but to water only. Mamie smelled it and could scarcely be held in; the sorrel plunged at her side.

XXIV
SHEATH-KNIFE

In full darkness he left the two horses fastened among the alders of the stream bed and started for the dobe house. At least, there were no horses of rurales waiting at the gateway of El Relicario, nor any lights to be seen in front; but moving around to the side, he fancied a faint ashen shaft farther on from an unglazed window. He knocked. A pall seemed to have fallen upon the world—before the step, the moving candle—and the señorita’s face, finger pressed across her lips as she pointed to the little room. Then he was following her candle through the passage.

There was Bart—bloodless, startlingly altered, but asleep, not dead, as he had thought in the first flash. And presently, Elbert began to feel himself standing about like a stranger. Either he hadn’t seen straight at daybreak, or the señorita had become a woman since then; no face of a peon girl by a lonely roadway, this woman of El Relicario to whom he had offered coins, but of one risen to emergencies, as only quality and breeding can arise. She had led him out into a hallway and was speaking as one who had found her place and work in life.

‘He will be so glad to hear you have come. I have said you would return, but he could not be sure. There is food for you waiting—please come.’