was called from sentry to sentry on the mesa where the workers
in flint shaped the arrow-points, and were guards as well for the
village below.

There was no mistaking the glint of sunlight on steel and helmet, and
the beasts with strange strappings. The men of the beards were indeed
at the very edge of their planted fields!

And they saw more than that, for they saw a girl who ran from the
shore to meet them. So fleet was her running that her hair swept like
a dusk cloud behind her, and the soldier Gonzalvo stared at her with
open mouth.

"By the true cross, that looks better to me than the thimble full of
gold!" he announced, and Don Ruy laughed and put his horse on the
other side of Don Diego as though to protect him from temptation.

"You, and his reverence the padre, have the records and the prayers to
your share," he suggested,--"but eyes bright as those--and lips as
tempting--"

"The heathen wench does look like the seven deadly sins for
enticement," agreed Don Diego and made the sign of the cross.

"A shameless wench, indeed," agreed Padre Vicente--"with her bosom
bare, and little but her hair as a cloak!--What is it she calls?--Holy
God!--did you hear?"

All had halted now. Pretty women and girls had been hidden in the
villages of their trail. Even if they chanced to glimpse one it was by
chance--and among the wall-housed barbarians no dames bold as this one
had been seen:--neither had one been seen so alluring.

Again her voice reached them and this time the tones were clear and
the words certain.

"Greetings to you--Lords--Castilians!"

A shout went up from the men. At last a land had been reached where an
interpreter was not needed for the woman. It put a different
complexion on the day. Tired men straightened in their saddles and Ruy
Sandoval laughed at the amaze on the face of Gonzalvo--that hardy
soldier of many lands stared as if by a witch enthralled.

"How call you yourself, mistress?" inquired the priest coldly, "and is
it the custom of the men of the P[=o]-s[=o]n-ge to send their wives to
greet men who travel?"

"Yahn Tsyn-deh I am,"--she said--"and not wife."

"Humph!" the grunt of Maestro Diego was not polite. Even the desert
might not be a safe place to bring youth if damsels of this like grew
in the sage clumps. "It is said to be a good luck sign when a man
comes first over the threshold on a New Year's day and on a
Monday,--it starts the year and the week aright--and how read y