“Hurry up, and remember she is dying.  Go softly and speak gently, or by the God of heaven, you’ll go with her to the Judgment Seat to answer for that deed right now!”

Slowly the two rose.  Their clothes were torn, their hair disheveled, the ground at their feet was red with their blood.  They were as bitter, as distrustful now as when their struggle began.  For brute force never conquers anything.  It can only hold in check by fear of its power to destroy the body.  Above the iron fist of the fighter, and the sword and cannon of the soldier, stands the risen Christ who carried his own cross up Mount Calvary—­and “there they crucified him.”

The two young men, spent with their struggle, their faces stained with dirt and bloody sweat, crossed the river and sought the shadowy place where Little Blue Flower sat beside Sister Anita.  Twice Santan tried to escape, and twice Beverly brought him quickly to his place.  It must have been here that I caught sight of them from the rock above.

“One more move like that and the ghost of Sister Anita will walk behind you on every trail you follow as long as your flat feet hit the earth,” Beverly declared.

“All Indians are afraid of ghosts and I was just too tired to fight any more,” he said to me afterward when he told me the story of that hour by the San Christobal River.

Sister Anita lay with wide-open eyes, her hands moving feebly as she clutched at her crucifix.  Her hour was almost spent.

Santan stood motionless before her, as Beverly with a grip on his arm said, firmly: 

“Tell her you did not aim at her, and ask her to forgive you.  It will help to save your own soul sometime, maybe.”

Santan looked at Little Blue Flower.  But she gave no heed to him as she put the dropped crucifix into the weakening fingers.  Murder, as such, is as horrifying to the gentle Hopi tribe as it is sport for the cruel Apache.

Beverly loosed his hold now.

“I did not want to hurt you.  Forgive me!” Santan said, slowly, as though each word were plucked from him by red-hot pincers.

Sister Anita heard and turned her eyes.

“Kneel down and tell her again,” Beverly said, more gently.

The Apache dropped on his knees beside the dying woman and repeated his words.  Sister Anita smiled sweetly.

“Heaven will forgive you even as I do,” she murmured, and closed her eyes.

“Go softly.  This is sacred ground,” my cousin said.

The Indian rose and passed silently down the trail, leaving Little Blue Flower and Beverly Clarenden together with the dead.  At the stream he paused and pulled his knife from the sands beneath the trickling waters, and then went on his way.

But an Indian never forgets.

Rex Krane, who had hurried hither from the chapel, closed the eyes and folded the thin hands of the martyred woman, and sent Beverly forward for help to dispose of the garment of clay that had been Sister Anita.  From that day something manly and serious came into Beverly Clarenden’s face to stay, but his sense of humor and his fearlessness were unchanged.