Page:Death Comes for the Archbishop.pdf/246

 stroked the drum-head with a stick or merely tapped it with his fingers. When he finished the song he was singing, he rose and introduced the little boys, his nephews, by their Indian names, Eagle Feather and Medicine Mountain, after which he nodded to them in dismissal. They vanished into the house. Eusabio handed the drum to his wife and walked away with his guest.

“Eusabio,” said the Bishop, “I want to send a letter to Father Vaillant, at Tucson. I will send Jacinto with it, provided you can spare me one of your people to accompany me back to Santa Fé.”

“I myself will ride with you to the Villa,” said Eusabio. The Navajos still called the capital by its old name.

Accordingly, on the following morning, Jacinto was dispatched southward, and Father Latour and Eusabio, with their pack-mule, rode to the east.

The ride back to Santa Fé was something under four hundred miles. The weather alternated between blinding sand-storms and brilliant sunlight. The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,—and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills