cia, who was nearest, caught sight of it.

"Ai! Tula!" she said in reproof, "you to take that when the poor----"

Tula flashed one killing look at her, and Valencia stopped dead, and
turned an ashen gray, and Rotil watching!

"Ah--ha! I thought it!" he jeered. "Now whose trick is it to make me a
fool? Come, sift this thing! You," to Valencia, "have looked on this
before. Whose is it?"

"Senor--I----"

"So!" he said with a sort of growl in the voice, "something chokes
you? Look at me, not at the others! Also listen:--if a lie is told to
me, every liar here will go before a firing squad. Whose is this
crucifix?"

Valencia's eyes looked sorrow on Tula, still under his hand, and then
on the wood and silver thing held up before her. The sun was just
rolling hot and red above the mountains, and Rotil's shaggy head was
outlined in a sort of curious radiance as the light struck the white
wall across the patio at his back. Even the silver of the crucifix
caught a glimmer of it, and to Valencia he looked like the warrior
padres of whom her grandmother used to tell, who would thunder hell's
terrors on the frightened neophytes until the bravest would grovel in
the dust and do penances unbelievable.

That commanding picture came between her and Rotil,--the outlaw and
soldier and patriot. She stumbled forward with a pleading gesture
towards Tula.

"Excellency, the child does no harm. She is a stranger in the house.
She has picked it up perhaps when lost by the senora, and----"

"What senora?"

"She who is most sorrowful guest here, Excellency, and her arms still
bruised from the iron chains of El Aleman."

"And her name?"

"Excellency, it is the woman saved from your man by the Americano
senor here beside you. And,--she asked to be nameless while sheltered
at Mesa Blanca."

"But not to me! So this is a game between you two--" and he looked
from Tula to Kit with sinister threat in his eyes, "it is then _your_
woman who----"

"Ramon--no!" said a voice from the far shadows, and the black shawled
figure stood erect and cast off the muffling disguise. Her pale face
shone like a star above all the kneeling Indians.

"God of heaven!" he muttered, and his hand fell from the shoulder of
Tula. "You--_you_ are one of the women who knelt here for vengeance?"

"For justice," she said, "but I was here for a reason different;--it
was a place to hide. No one helped me, let the child go! Give these
women what they ask or deny th