which there are no words, and Don Ruy laid his hand on the shoulder of
the lad, and drew him in silence out of the shadow of the roofed
entrance.

"It is good to be where the bright sun shows things as they are," he
decided. "The shadows and silence of that place tied the tongue. How
feel you now, Lad, as to the story of Don Teo the Greek and the seeds
that were given to the maid as sacred medicine?"

"But--the man died--so says the padre--and the woman--"

Then they fell silent and each was thinking back over the trails of
the desert, and their company of thirty men--and the care needed to
find the way alive with all the help of provisions and of beasts.

"The woman had a greater journey and a more troublous one,"--said Don
Ruy. "These are clearly the fruits of Spanish gardens, but in some
other way have they reached this land. It was made plain that the
place of the palms where he left her was unknown leagues towards the
western sea, and that the maid could only die in the desert."

"He crossed this river in his travels before he saw the Indian maid of
medicine charms," reminded the secretary. "Do you not recall the
journeys with the war people? He may have bestowed upon others the
seeds of other lands."

Don Ruy drew a long breath, and then laughed.

"By our Lady!--You bring joy with that thought!" he said heartily.--"I
made sure the Devil was alive and was working ahead on our trail when
my eyes were startled by the offering of fruit and grain! You looked
as if it might be your own hair was rising to stand alone! We are but
children in the dark, Chico, and there come times when we have fear.
But your thought is the right thought, lad. Of a certainty he crossed
this country; that there is no record is not so strange a thing--he
was only another brown savage among many!"

They spoke together of the strangeness of their findings in the
village--and its exceeding good arrangement with ladders to draw above
in case of attack, and only one house--that of the doves and the
fruit--into which one could walk from the court. All the others were
as in the other villages--terraces, and the first terrace had doors
only in the roof so that a blank adobe wall faced the court and the
curious. Each great house with rooms by the score, and its height from
two to five stories, was the home of many, and a fort in case of
need.

While they commented on these things, two men came running swiftly
through the gate from the Castil