When she had promised with grief, not to betray him, for the sake of their father, she came to the greater guilt. But feeling safe now, Luis grew hard. Murder? The dog of an American deserved it. The man had set the dogs on him, Luis. The girl would be better off without this father, anyhow. “She likes me,” Luis swelled. He had called upon her the night before and was to go again tonight. “But the child, the child?” Consuelo almost screamed. Luis shrugged. They would not harm him. He’d told his men to let the boy go. Luis would stay for no more words, but went off impatiently. Consuelo took her black shawl--her father had given her leave now to go out--and as she passed through the sala was very gentle with the querulous questioning of Doña Gertrudis, sitting plump and pathetic alone there, totally upset by the calamity to her husband. Consuelo passed out into the heat that still rose from the dust of the streets and radiated from the sun-soaked walls about. She came to the garden of Father Filemon. Her face was stricken. In these few days life had turned from a soft easy round of hot chocolate, cool wine, fresh frocks, a looking for new gifts to be brought to her through the unconsidered labor and pain and bloodshed of others, to this sorrow and shame and sacrifice, so near to the hearth and the heart. And she had sent away the brave and honest American to do what Luis himself should have done. She’d sent him down into a dangerous land unknown to him, where the Apache and the Sioux and the very corn-growing Pueblos were unfriendly. In her pride she had sent him away, this tall young man whom she loved, without listening to a word he had to say to her. She had shielded her brother with his good name, and he unable to defend himself because he had gone on her mission. And now she knew that he had loved her. She knelt before the padre. CHAPTER IX THE WHITE SANDS Steven and Juan were lost in the world of vast sand dunes; yellow dunes that rose like titanic anthills, while they were the ants, to labor up one side and down the other. In order to make speed and if possible to overtake Bragdon, they had descended the Rio Grande from a point just below Albuquerque in a bull boat, a canoe made of scraped buffalo hide drawn taut over willow boughs. On the wide muddy stream, burdened with tons of the erosive soil through which it flowed, they wound southward at the rate of thirty, sometimes forty, miles a day, swirling between low wooded banks beyond which blue mountains lay always in sight.