The Mexicans dropped to their knees in humble prayer, and Ferdinand Ramero seemed turned to a man of stone.  A hand was gently laid upon my arm and Jondo and Rex Krane stood beside us.  A voice far off was sounding in my ears.

“Go back to your homes and meet me at the church to-morrow night.  You, Ferdinand Ramero, go now to the chapel yonder and wait until I come.”

What happened next is lost in misty waves of forgetfulness.

XVI

FINISHING TOUCHES

“Yet there be certain times in a young man’s life when through
great sorrow or sin all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so
that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of
manhood."

          
                                                                                                —­KIPLING.

The heat of midday was tempered by a light breeze up the San Christobal Valley, and there was not a single cloud in the June skies to throw a softening shadow on the yellow plain.  A little group of Mexicans, riding northward with sullen faces, urged on their jaded ponies viciously as they thought of the gold that was to have been paid them for this morning’s work, and of the gold that to-morrow night must go to pay the priest who should shrive them; and they had nothing gained wherewith to pay.  Their leader, whom they had served, had been trapped in his own game, and they felt themselves abused and deceived.

Down by the brown sands of the river Father Josef waited at the door of the half-ruined little stone chapel for the strange group coming slowly toward him:  Ferdinand Ramero, riding like a captured but unconquered king, his head erect, his flashing eyes seeing nobody; Jondo who could make the shabbiest piece of horseflesh take on grace when he mounted it, his tanned cheek flushed, and the spirit of supreme sacrifice looking out through his dark-blue eyes; Eloise, drooping like a white flower, but brave of spirit now, sure that her grief and anxiety would be lifted somehow.  I rode beside her, glad to catch the faint smile in her eyes when she looked at me.  And last of all, Rex Krane, with the same old Yankee spirit, quick to help a fellow-man and oblivious to personal danger.  So we all came to the chapel, but at the door Rex wheeled and rode away, muttering, as he passed me: 

“I’ve got business to look after, and not a darned thing to confess.”

And Beverly!  He was not with us.

When Rex Krane told his bride good-by up in the Clarenden home on the Missouri bluff, Mat had whispered one last request: 

“Look after Bev.  He never sees danger for himself, nor takes anything seriously, least of all an enemy, whom he will befriend, and make a joke of it.”

And so it happened that Rex had stayed behind to care for Beverly’s arrow wound when Bill Banney had gone out with Jondo on the Kiowa trail to search for me this side of Pawnee Rock.