A grim day, his nerve at lowest ebb, nothing of the lift or glow he had known in moments of last night’s riding with Bart. Would they ever ride together again? Was Bart lying dead now in that inner room? Fenceless foothills of Sonora--ages in a day! He didn’t feel quite sane, riding down to the creek in the dusk at last. He couldn’t hold his mind to thought of danger, but to water only. Mamie smelled it and could scarcely be held in; the sorrel plunged at her side. XXIV SHEATH-KNIFE IN full darkness he left the two horses fastened among the alders of the stream bed and started for the dobe house. At least, there were no horses of rurales waiting at the gateway of El Relicario, nor any lights to be seen in front; but moving around to the side, he fancied a faint ashen shaft farther on from an unglazed window. He knocked. A pall seemed to have fallen upon the world--before the step, the moving candle--and the señorita’s face, finger pressed across her lips as she pointed to the little room. Then he was following her candle through the passage. There was Bart--bloodless, startlingly altered, but asleep, not dead, as he had thought in the first flash. And presently, Elbert began to feel himself standing about like a stranger. Either he hadn’t seen straight at daybreak, or the señorita had become a woman since then; no face of a peon girl by a lonely roadway, this woman of El Relicario to whom he had offered coins, but of one risen to emergencies, as only quality and breeding can arise. She had led him out into a hallway and was speaking as one who had found her place and work in life. ‘He will be so glad to hear you have come. I have said you would return, but he could not be sure. There is food for you waiting--please come.’ He followed her through a firelit room, where the elderly man he had seen in the patio in the morning, arose and bowed with courtly grace, and from behind him the faded-faced woman smiled in the manner of far-off times. A wooden table, a pitcher of milk, corn-bread and rubbery cheese of goat’s milk--but Elbert hardly tasted what he put in his mouth. Horsemen had ridden by in the early morning to Fonseca, the señorita told him, an unusual thing, but they had not stopped, and others had passed later, going the opposite way. She left the room and returned, dragging a small sack of grain for the horses, which Bart had asked her to procure, and there was a package of food for Elbert’s need of to-morrow--all this spoken of with frequent gestures toward the wounded man in the little room; her every thought and sentence apparently blent with something Bart had said or wished. Yes, he would live, she repeated, but his recovery would take many days. Then Elbert heard his own words in careful Spanish of the book: ‘Tell him I shall be waiting--that I will come again to-morrow night or the next night--that I shall wait for him until he is ready to travel--’ ‘You mean to leave now--at once?’