he halted beside her though the others
welcomed with joy the sight of the horses for the rest of the trail.

"Tula!" he said bending over her, "Tula, we come to welcome you,--my
horse is for your riding."

She looked up when he touched her.

"Friend of me," she murmured wistfully, "you made me put a mark at
that place after we met in the first dawn,--so I was knowing it well.
Also my mother was knowing,--and it was where she died last night
under the moon. See, this is the knife on which Anita died in that
place. It is ended for us--the people of Miguel, and the people of
Cajame!"

"Tula, you have done wonderful things, many deeds to make the spirit
of Miguel proud. Is that not so, my friends?" and he turned to the
others, travel-stained, sick and weary, yet one in their cries of the
gratitude they owed to Tula and to him, by which he perceived that
Tula had, for her own reasons, credited him with the plan of ransom.

They tried brokenly to tell of their long fear and despair in the
strangers' land,--and of sickness and deaths there. Then the miracle
of Tula walking by the exalted excellencia of that great place, and
naming one by one the Palomitas names, forgetting none;--until all who
lived were led out from that great planting place of sugar cane and
maize, and their feet set on the northern way.

When they reached this joyous part of the recital words failed, and
they wept as they smiled at him and touched the head of Tula tenderly.
Even a gorgeous and strange _manta_ she now wore was pressed to the
lips of women who were soon to see their children or their desolate
mothers.

His eyes grew misty as they thronged about her,--the slender dark
child of the breed of a leader. The new _manta_ was of yellow wool and
cotton, bordered with dull green and little squares of flaming scarlet
woven in it by patient Indian hands of the far south coast. It made
her look a bit royal in the midst of the drab-colored, weary band.

She seemed scarcely to hear their praise, or their sobs and prayers.
Her face was still and her gaze far off and brooding as her fingers
stroked the curved blade over and over.

"An Indian stole that knife from the German after his face was cut
with it by her sister," said Marto Cavayso quietly while the vaqueros
were helping the weaker refugees to mount, two to each animal. "That
man gives it to her at the place where Marta, her mother, died in the
night. So after that she does not sleep or eat