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Jondo had said that Father Josef had somewhere back a strain of Indian blood in his veins. It must have been this that gave the fiber of self control to his countenance as he looked with pitying eyes at Jondo and Eloise St. Vrain. "The hour is struck," he said, sadly. "And you shall hear your record, point by point, because you ask it now.
One must have known Jondo, with his bluff manner and sunny smile and daring spirit, to feel the force, of these brave sad words. I felt intuitively that I had laid bare a wound of his by my story. "It is for Eloise, not for my curiosity, that I have come to you," I said, gently. "And you didn't come too soon, boy." Jondo was himself in a moment.
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."
"Have you lost a man, Jondo?" Smith, still sick in his wagon, inquired. And the sun was filling the eastern horizon with a roseate glow. It would be above the edge of the plains in a little while, and still I had not returned. Breakfast followed, with many questions for the absent one. There was an eagerness to be off early and an uneasiness began to pervade the camp.
Beverly said to me one evening, as we rounded a low hill and followed a deep little creek down to a shallow fording-place. "All we want is a real princess and a real giant. Look at these big trees all you can, for Jondo says pretty soon we won't see trees at all." "Maybe we'll have Indians instead of giants," I suggested.
In that hour Beverly Clarenden lost a year of his life and I gained one. From that time we were no longer little and big to each other we were comrades. It must have been nearly midnight when I crept out of bed and slipped into the big room where Uncle Esmond and Jondo sat by the fireplace, talking together. "Hello, little night-hawk! Come here and roost," Jondo said, opening his arms to me.
She did not tell me what Jondo had said, for Beverly and Mat and the two rollicking boys joined us just then and we talked of many things of the earlier years.
Nobody knows when Mary Marchland died, nor where she is buried, except Fred and his confessor, Father Josef." "How far can a man's hate run, Jondo?" I asked. "Oh, not so far as a man's love. Listen, Gail." Never a man had a truer eye and a sweeter smile than my big Jondo.
As for Jondo, years ago when we had met Father Josef out by the sandy arroyo, he had left us to follow the good man somewhere, and had not come back to the Exchange Hotel until nightfall. Something had come into his face that day that never left it again. And now that something had deepened in the glance of his eye and the firm-set mouth.
"It was too strongly built by one who knew men's inmost souls, and what they needed most," Father Josef replied. "You drove me to this by your insistence. I would have shielded you and these." He turned to Eloise and Jondo as he spoke. "One more point, since you hold it ready to spring when I am through. You stand accused of plotting for your father's murder.
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