ather overwhelmed by the knowledge that she had not
allowed even Marto to guess that the bag of gold was her very own!

He took her on the saddle in front of him because she drooped so
wearily there alone, and her head sank against his shoulder as if
momentarily she was glad to be thus supported.

"Poor little eaglet!" he said affectionately, "I will take you north
to Cap Pike, and someone else who will love you when she hears all
this; and in other years, quieter years, we will ride again into
Sonora, and----"

She shook her head against his shoulder, and he stopped short.

"Why, Tula!" he began in remonstrance, but she lifted her hand with a
curious gesture of finality.

"Friend of me," she said in a small voice with an undertone of sad
fatefulness, "words do not come today. They told you I am not sleeping
on this home trail, and it is true. I kept my mother alive long after
the death birds of the night were calling for her--it is so! Also
today at the dawn the same birds called above me,--above _me_! and
look!"

They had reached the summit of the valley's wall and for a half mile
ahead the others were to be seen on the trail to Soledad, but it was
not there she pointed, but to the northeast where a dark cloud hung
over the mountains. Its darkness was cleft by one lance of lightning,
but it was too far away for sound of thunder to reach them.

"See you not that the cloud in the sky is like a bird,--a dark angry
bird? Also it is over the trail to the north, but it is not for
you,--_I_ am the one first to see it! Senor, I will tell you, but I
telling no other--I think my people are calling me all the time, in
every way I look now. I no knowing how I go to them, but--I think I
go!"

CHAPTER XX

EAGLE AND SERPENT

Marto Cavayso gave to Kit Rhodes the burro-skin belt and a letter from
Dona Dolores Terain to the wife of Jose Perez.

"My work is ended at the hacienda until the mules come back for more
guns, and I will take myself to the adobe beyond the corrals for what
rest there may be. You are capitan under my general, so this goes to
you for the people of the girl he had a heart for. Myself,--I like
little their coyote whines and yells. It may be a giving of thanks, or
it may be a mourning for dead,--but it sounds to me like an anthem
made in hell."

He referred to the greeting songs of the returned exiles, and the
wails for the dead left behind on the trail. The women newly come from
Palomitas s