s. Kit noted that when each little task was finished
for Valencia, she would go outside in the sunlight where she had the
familiar ranges and far blue mountains in sight.

"Here it makes much trouble only to live in a house," she said
pointing to the needlework on a table cover. "The bowls of food will
make that dirty in one eating, and then what? Women in fine houses
are only as mares in time of thrashing the grain--no end and no
beginning to the work,--they only tread their circle."

"Right you are, sister," agreed Kit, "they do make a lot of whirligig
work for themselves, all the same as your grandmothers painting
pottery that smash like eggshells. But life here isn't all play at
that, and there may be something doing before sleep time tonight. I
went after you so I would have a comrade I knew would stick."

She only gazed at him without question.

"You remember, Tula, the woman led by the padre at Soledad?"

She nodded silently.

"It may be that woman is captive to the same men who took your
people," he said slowly watching her, "and it may be we can save
her."

"May it also be that we can catch the man?" she asked, and her eyes
half closed, peered up at him in curious intensity. "Can that be, O
friend?"

"Some day it must surely be, Tula."

"One day it must be,--one day, and prayers are making all the times
for that day," she insisted stolidly. "The old women are talking, and
for that day they want him."

"What day, Tula?"

"The Judas day."

Kit Rhodes felt a curious creepy sensation of being near an unseen
danger, some sleeping serpent basking in the sun, harmless until
aroused for attack. He thought of the gentle domestic Valencia, and
now this child, both centered on one thought--to sacrifice a traitor
on the day of Judas!

"Little girls should make helpful prayers," he ventured rather lamely,
"not vengeance prayers."

"I was the one to make cry of a woman, when my father went under the
earth," she said. It was her only expression of the fact that she had
borne a woman's share of all their joint toil in the desert,--and he
caught her by the shoulder, as she turned away.

"Why, Kid Cleopatra, it isn't a woman's work you've done at all. It's
a man's job you've held down and held level," he declared heartily.
"That's why I am counting on you now. I need eyes to watch when I have
to be in other places."

"I watch," she agreed, "I watch for you, but maybe I make my own
prayers also;--all the ti