and corn for planting, but lingered after the good supper of Valencia,
a holiday feast compared with their own sketchy culinary performance
in the _jacal_ of the far fields. They scanned the trail towards
Palomitas, and then the way down the far western valley, evidently
loath to leave until their friend Clodomiro should arrive, and Isidro
expected him before sunset.

But he came later from towards Soledad, a tall lad with fluttering
ribbands of pink and green from his banda and his elbows, and a girdle
of yellow fluttering fringed ends to the breeze,--all the frank
insignia of a youth in the market for marriage. He suggested a gay
graceful bird as he rode rapidly in the long lope of the range. His
boy friends of the planted fields went out to meet him at the corral,
and look after his horse while he went in to supper. He halted to
greet them, and then walked soberly across the plaza where pepper
trees and great white alisos trailed dusk shadows in the early
starlight.

"What _reata_ held you?" asked Isidro. "Has Soledad grown a place for
comradeship?"

"No, senor," said the lad passing into the dining room where two
candles gave him light in the old adobe room, "it is comradeship we do
not need, but it is coming to us."

He seated himself on the wooden bench and his grandmother helped him
from a smoking plate of venison. He looked tired and troubled, and he
had not even taken note that a stranger was beside Isidro in the
shadows.

"What nettle stings you, boy?" asked his grandfather sarcastically,
and at that he looked up and rose to his feet at sight of Rhodes.

"Your pardon, senor, I stumbled past like a bat blind in the light,"
he muttered, and as he met Kit's eyes and recognized him his face lit
up and his white teeth gleamed in a smile.

"The saints are in it that you are here again, senor!" he exclaimed,
"and you came on this day when most needed."

"Eat and then tell your meaning," said Isidro, but Clodomiro glanced
toward the kitchen, and then listened for the other boys. They were
laughing down at the corral. Clodomiro's horse had thrown one of
them.

"With your permission, grandfather, talk first," he said and the two
men moved to the bench opposite, leaning over towards him as his voice
was lowered.

"Today Marto Cavayso sent for me, he is foreman over there, and
strange things are going forward. He has heard that General Rotil
stripped Mesa Blanca and that all white people are gone from it. He