"You'll begin to like the life," he went on, "by the time you are
educated enough to leave us."  He turned teasingly to Cesca.  "You
think the white squaw can cross the desert soon by herself?"

Cesca spat disdainfully.

"No!  White squaw no good!  All time sit, sit, no work!  Kut-le heap
fool!"

"Oh, Cesca," cried Rhoda, "I'm too sick to work!  And see this meal
I've made!  Isn't it good?"

Cesca glanced disdainfully at the little heap of meal Rhoda had bruised
out so painfully.

"Huh!" she grunted.  "Feed 'em to the horses.  Injuns no eat 'em!"

Rhoda looked from the meal to her slender, tired fingers.  Cesca's
contempt hurt her unaccountably.  In her weakness her cleft chin
quivered.  She turned to Molly.

"Do you think it's so bad, Molly?"

That faithful friend grunted with rage and aimed a vicious kick at
Cesca.  Then she put a protecting arm about Rhoda.

"It's heap fine!  Cesca just old fool.  You love Molly.  Let Cesca go
to hell!"

Kut-le had been watching the little scene with tender eyes.  Now he
stooped and lifted Rhoda to her feet, then he raised one of the
delicate hands and touched it softly with his lips.

"Leave such work to the squaws, dear!  You aren't built for it.  Cesca,
you old lobster, you make me tired!  Go fix the turkeys!"

Cesca rose with dignity, flipped away her cigarette and walked with a
sniff over to the cooking-pot.  Rhoda drew her hands from the young
Indian's clasp and walked to the edge of the camp.  The hot pulse that
the touch of Kut-le's lips sent through her body startled her.

"I hate him!" she said to herself.  "I hate him!  I hate him!"

The trail that night was unusually difficult and Rhoda had to be rested
frequently.  At each stop, Kut-le tried to talk to her but she
maintained her silence.  They paused at dawn in a pocket formed by the
meeting of three divergent cañons.  Far, far above the desert as they
were, still farther above them stretched the wonderful barren ridges,
snow-capped and silent.  As Rhoda stood waiting for the squaws to
spread her blankets the peaks were lighted suddenly by the rays of the
still unseen sun.  For one unspeakable instant their snow crowns
flashed a translucent scarlet that trembled, shimmered, then melted to
a pink, then to a white so pure, so piercing that Rhoda trembled with
sudden awe.  Then as she looked, the sun rolled into view, blinding her
eyes, and she turned to her waiting blankets.

She had slept for several hours when she was wakened by a soft tap on
her shoulder.  She opened her eyes and would have risen but a voice
whispered:

"Hush!  Don't move!"

CHAPTER VIII

A BROADENING HORIZON

Rhoda lay stiffly, her heart beating wildly.  Kut-le and the squaws,
each a muffled, blanketed figure, lay sleeping some distance away.  Old
Alchise stood on solitary guard at the edge of the camp with his back
to her.

"Make as if you wanted to shift your blankets toward the cat's-claw
bush behind you!" went on the whispered voice.

Obediently, Rhoda sat erect.  Alchise turned slowly to light a
cigarette out of the wind.  Rhoda yawned, rose sleepily, looked under
her blanket and shook her, head irritably, then dragged her blankets
toward the neighboring cat's-claw.  Again she settled herself to sleep.
Alchise turned back to his view of the desert.

"I'm behind the bush here," whispered the voice.  "I'm a prospector.
Saw you make camp.  I don't know where any of the search parties are
but if you can crawl round to me I'll guarantee to get you to 'em
somehow.  Slip out of your blankets and leave 'em, rounded up as if you
was still under 'em.  Quick now and careful!"

Rhoda, her eyes never leaving Alchise's impassive back, drew herself
silently and swiftly from her blankets and with a clever touch or two
rounded them.  Then she crept around the cat's-claw, where a man
squatted, his eyes blazing with excitement.  He put up a sinewy, hand
to pull her from sight when, without warning, Rhoda sneezed.

Instantly there was the click of a rifle and Alchise shouted:

"Stop!"

"Confound it!" growled the man, rising to full view, "why didn't you
swallow it!"

"I couldn't!" replied Rhoda indignantly.  "You don't suppose I wanted
to!"

She turned toward the camp.  Alchise was standing stolidly covering
them with his rifle.  Kut-le was walking coolly toward them, while the
squaws sat gaping.

"Well!" exclaimed Kut-le.  "What can we do for you, Jim?"

The stranger, a rough tramp-like fellow in tattered overalls, wiped his
face, on which was a week's stubble.

"I'd always thought you was about white, Cartwell," he said, "but I see
you're no better than the rest of them.  What are you going to do with
me?"

Kut-le eyed his unbidden guest speculatively.

"Well, we'll have something to eat first.  I don't like to think on an
empty stomach.  Come over to my blanket and sit down, Jim."

Ignoring Rhoda, who was watching him closely, Kut-le seated himself on
his blanket beside Jim and offered him a cigarette, which was refused.

"I don't want no favors from you, Cartwell."  His voice was surly.
There was something more than his rough appearance that Rhoda disliked
about the man but she didn't know just what it was.  Kut-le's eyes
narrowed, but he lighted his own cigarette without replying.  "You're
up to a rotten trick and you know it, Cartwell," went on Jim.  "You
take my advice and let me take the girl back to her friends and you
make tracks down into Mexico as fast as the Lord'll let you."

Kut-le shifted the Navajo that hung over his naked shoulders.  He gave
a short laugh that Rhoda had never heard from him before.

"Let her go with you, Jim Provenso!  You know as well as I do that she
is safer with an Apache!  Anything else?"

"Yes, this else!"  Jim's voice rose angrily.  "If ever we get a chance
at you, we'll hang you sky high, see?  This may go with Injuns but not
with whites, you dirty pup!"

Suddenly Kut-le rose and, dropping his blanket, stood before the white
man in his bronze perfection.

"Provenso, you aren't fit to look at a decent woman!  Don't put on dog
just because you belong to the white race.  You're disreputable, and
you know it.  Don't speak to Miss Tuttle again; you are too rotten!"

The prospector had risen and stood glaring at Kut-le.

"I'll kill you for that yet, you dirty Injun!" he shouted.

"Shucks!" sniffed the Indian.  "You haven't the nerve to injure
anything but a woman!"

Jim's face went purple.

"For two bits I'd knock your block off, right now."

"There isn't a cent in the camp." Kut-le turned to Rhoda.  "You get the
point of the conversation, I hope?"

Rhoda's eyes were blazing.  She had gotten the point, and yet--Jim was
a white man!  Anything white was better than an Indian.

"I'd take my chances with Mr. Provenso," she said, joyfully conscious
that nothing could have hurt Kut-le more than this reply.

Kut-le's lips stiffened.

"Lunch is ready," he said.

"None of _your_ grub for mine," remarked Jim.  "What are you going to
do with me?"

"Alchise!" called Kut-le.  "Eat something, then take this fellow out
and lose him.  Take the rest of the day to it.  You know the next camp!"

Then he folded his arms across his chest and waited for Alchise to
finish his meal.  Jim stood in sullen silence for a minute.  Then he
seated himself on a nearby rock.

"No, you don't," he said.  "If you get me out of here, you'll have to
use force."

Kut-le shrugged his shoulders.

"A gun at your back will move you!"

Rhoda was looking at the white man's face with a great longing.  He was
rough and ugly, but he was of her own breed.  Suddenly the longing for
her own that she was beginning to control surged to her lips.

"I can't bear this!" she cried.  "I'm going mad!  I'm going mad!"

All the camp turned startled faces toward the girl, and Rhoda recovered
her self-possession.  She ran to Kut-le and laid her hand on his arm,
lifting a lovely, pleading face to his.

"O Kut-le!  Kut-le!" in the tone that she had used to Cartwell.  "Can't
you see that it's no use?  He is white, Kut-le!  Let me go with him!
Let me go back to my own people!  O Kut-le, let me go!  O let me go!"

Kut-le looked down at the hand on his arm.  Rhoda was too excited to
notice that his whole body shook at this unwonted touch.  His voice was
caressing but his face remained inscrutable.

"Dear girl," he answered, "he is not your kind!  He might originally
have been of your color, but now he's streaked with yellow.  Let him
go.  You are safer here with me!"

Rhoda turned from him impatiently.

"It's quite useless," she said to Jim; "no pleading or threat will move
him.  But I do thank you--" her voice breaking a little.  "Go back with
Alchise and tell them to come for me quickly!"

Some responsive flash of sympathy came to Jim's bleared eyes.

Rhoda stood watching Alchise marshall him out of the camp.  She moaned
helplessly:

"O my people, my own people!" and Kut-le eyed her with unfathomable
gaze.

As soon as lunch was finished, camp was broken.  All the rest of the
day and until toward midnight they wound up a wretched trail that
circled the mountain ranges, For hours, Kut-le did not speak to Rhoda.
These days of Rhoda's contempt were very hard on him.  The touch of her
hand that morning, the old note in her voice, still thrilled him.  At
midnight as they watched the squaws unroll her blankets, he touched her
shoulder.

"Dear," he said, in his rich voice, "it is in you to love me if only I
am patient.  And--God, but it's worth all the starvation in the
meantime!  Won't you say good-night to me, Rhoda?"

Rhoda looked at the stalwart figure in the firelight.  The young eyes
so tragic in their youth, the beautiful mouth, sad in its firm curves,
were strangely appealing.  Just for an instant the horrors of the past
weeks vanished.

"Good-night!" said Rhoda.  Then she rolled herself in her blankets and
slept.  By the next morning, however, the old repulsion had returned
and she made no response to Kut-le's overtures.

Day succeeded day now, until Rhoda lost all track of time.  Endlessly
they crossed desert and mountain ridges.  Endlessly they circled
through dusky cañon and sun-baked arroyo.  Always Rhoda looked forward
to each new camping-place with excitement.  Here, the rescuers might
stumble upon them!  Always she started at each unexpected shadow along
the trail.  Always she thrilled at a wisp of smokelike cloud beyond the
cañon edge.  Always she felt a quiver of certainty at sudden break of
twig or fall of stone.  But the days passed and gradually hope changed
to desperation.

The difficulties of the camp life would have been unbearable to her had
not her natural fortitude and her intense pride come to her rescue.
The estimate of her that Kut-le had so mercilessly presented to her the
first day of her abduction returned to her more and more clearly as the
days wore on.  At first she thought of them only with scorn.  Then as
her loneliness increased and she was forced back upon herself she grew
to wonder what in her had given the Indian such an opinion.  There was
something in the nakedness of the desert, something in its piercing
austerity that forced her to truthfulness with herself.  Little by
little she found herself trying to acquire Kut-le's view of her.

Her liking for Molly grew.  She spent long afternoons with the squaw,
picking up desert lore.

"Do you like to work, Molly?" she asked the squaw one afternoon, as she
sorted seed for Molly to bruise.

"What else to do?" asked Molly.  "Sit with hands folded on stomach, so?
No!  Still hands make crazy head.  Now you work with your hands you no
so sorry in head, huh?"

Rhoda thought for a moment.  There was a joy in the rude camp tasks
that she had assumed that she never had found in golf or automobiling.
She nodded, then said wistfully:

"You think I'm no good at all, don't you, Molly?"

Molly shrugged her shoulders.

"Me not got papooses.  You not got papooses.  Molly and you no good!
Molly is heap strong.  What good is that?  When she die she no has
given her strength to tribe, no done any good that will last.  You are
heap beautiful.  What good is that?  You no give your face to your
tribe.  What good are you?  Molly and you might as well die tomorrow.
Work, have papooses, die.  That all squaws are for.  Great Spirit says
so.  Squaw's own heart says so."

Rhoda sat silently looking at the squaw's squat figure, the
toil-scarred fingers, the good brown eyes out of which looked a woman's
soul.  Vaguely Rhoda caught a point of view that made her old ideals
seem futile.  She smoothed the Indian woman's hands.

"I sometimes think you are a bigger woman than I am, Molly," she said
humbly.

"You are heap good to look at."  Molly spoke wistfully.  "Molly heap
homely.  You think that makes any difference to the Great Spirit?"

Rhoda's eyes widened, a little.  Did it make any difference?  After
all, what counted with the Great Spirit?  She stared at the barren
ranges that lifted mute peaks to the silent heavens.  Always, always
the questions and so vague the answers!  Suddenly Rhoda knew that her
beauty had counted greatly with her all her life, had given her her
sense of superiority to the rest of the world.  Rhoda squirmed.  She
hated this faculty of the Indians and the desert to make her seem
small.  She never had felt so with her own kind.  Her own kind!  Would
she never again know the deference, the gentleness, the loving
tenderness of her own people?  Rhoda forgot Molly's wistful question.

"O Molly!" she cried.  "I can't stand this!  I want my own people!  I
want my own people!"

Molly's eyes filled with tears.

"No!  No cry, little Sun-streak!" she pleaded, putting an arm around
Rhoda and holding her to her tenderly.  "Any peoples that loves you is
your own peoples.  Kut-le loves you.  Molly loves you.  We your peoples
too!"

"No!  No!  Never!" sobbed Rhoda.  "Molly, if you love me, take me back
to my own kind!  You shall never leave me, Molly!  I do love you.  You
are an Indian but somehow I have a feeling for you I never had for any
one else."

A sudden light of passionate adoration burned in Molly's eyes, a light
that never was to leave them again when they gazed on Rhoda.  But she
shook her head.

"You ask Molly to give up her peoples but you don't want to give up
yours.  You stay with Molly and Kut-le.  Learn what desert say 'bout
life, 'bout people.  When you _sabe_ what the desert say 'bout that you
_sabe_ almost much as Great Spirit!"

"Molly, listen!  When Kut-le and Alchise go off on one of their hunts
and Cesca goes to sleep, you and I will steal off and hide until night,
and you will show me how to get home again.  O Molly, I'll be very good
to you if you will do this for me!  Don't you see how foolish Kut-le
is?  I can never, never marry him!  His ways are not my ways.  My ways
are not his!  Always I will be white and he Indian.  He will get over
this craze for me and want one of his own kind.  Molly, listen to your
heart!  It must tell you white to the white, Indian to the Indian.
Dear, dear Molly, I want to go home!"

"No!  No!  Molly promise Kut-le to keep his white squaw for him.
Injuns they always keep promises.  And Molly _sabe_ some day when you
learn more you be heap glad old Molly keep you for Kut-le."

Rhoda turned away with a sigh at the note of finality in Molly's voice.
Kut-le was climbing the trail toward the camp with a little pile of
provisions.  So far he had not failed to procure when needed some sort
of rations--bacon, flour and coffee--though since her abduction Rhoda
had seen no human habitation, Cesca was preparing supper.  She was
pounding a piece of meat on a flat stone, muttering to herself when a
piece fell to the ground.  Sometimes she wiped the sand from the fallen
bit on her skirt.  More often she flung it into the stew-pot unwiped.

"Cesca!" cried Rhoda, "do keep the burro out of the meat!"  The burro
that Kut-le recently had acquired was sniffing at the meat.

Cesca gave no heed except to murmur, "Burro heap hungry!"

"I am going to begin to cook my own meals, Molly," said Rhoda.  "I am
strong enough now, and Cesca is so dirty!"

Kut-le entered the camp in time to hear Rhoda's resolution.

"Will you let me eat with you?" he asked courteously.  "I don't enjoy
dirt, myself!"

Rhoda stared at the young man.  The calm effrontery of him, the
cleverness of him, to ask a favor of her!  She turned from him to the
distant ranges.  She did not realize how much she turned from the
roughness of the camp to the far desert views!  Brooding, aloof, how
big the ranges were, how free, how calm!  For the first time her
keeping Kut-le in Coventry seemed foolish to her.  Of what avail was
her silence, except to increase her own loneliness?  Suddenly she
smiled grimly.  The game was a good one.  Perhaps she could play it as
well as the Indian.

"If you wish, you may," she said coldly.

Then she ignored the utter joy and astonishment in the young man's face
and set about roasting the rabbit that Molly had dressed.  She tossed
the tortillas as Molly had taught her and baked them over the coals.
She set forth the cans and baskets that formed the camp dinner-set and
served the primitive meal.  Kut-le watched the preparations silently.
When the rabbit was cooked the two sat down on either side of the flat
rock that served as a table while the other three squatted about
Cesca's stew-pot near the fire.

It was the first time that Rhoda and Kut-le had eaten tête-à-tête.
Hitherto Rhoda had taken her food off to a secluded corner and eaten it
alone.  There was an intimacy in thus sitting together at the meal
Rhoda had prepared, that both felt.

"Are you glad you did this for me, Rhoda?" asked Kut-le.

"I didn't do it for you!" returned Rhoda.  "I did it for my own
comfort!"

Something in her tone narrowed the Indian's eyes.

"Why should you speak as a queen to a poor devil of a subject?  By what
particular mark of superiority are you exempt from work?  For a time
you have had the excuse of illness, but you no longer have that.  I
should say that making tortillas was better than sitting in sloth while
they are made for you!  Do you never have any sense of shame that you
are forever taking and never giving?"

Rhoda answered angrily.

"I'm not at all interested in your opinions."

But the young Apache went on.

"It makes me tired to hear the white women of your class talk of their
equality to men!  You don't do a thing to make you equal.  You live off
some one else.  You don't even produce children.  Huh!  No wonder
nature kicks you out with all manner of illness.  You are mere cloggers
of the machinery.  For heaven's sake, wake up, Rhoda!  Except for your
latent possibilities, you aren't in it with Molly!"

"You have some touchstone, I suppose," replied Rhoda contemptuously,
"by which you are made competent to sit in judgment on mankind?"

"I sure have!" said Kut-le.  "It is that you so live that you die
spiritually richer than you were born.  Life is a simple thing, after
all.  To keep one's body and soul healthy, to bear children, to give
more than we take.  And I believe that in the end it will seem to have
been worth while."

Rhoda made no answer.  Kut-le ate on in silence for a time, then he
said wistfully:

"Don't you enjoy this meal with me, just a little?"

Rhoda glanced from Kut-le's naked body to her own torn clothing, then
at the crude meal.

"I don't enjoy it, no," she answered quietly.

Something in the quiet sincerity of the voice caused Kut-le to rise
abruptly and order the Indians to break camp.  But on the trail that
night he rode close beside her whenever the way permitted and talked to
her of the beauty of the desert.  At last, lashed to desperation by her
indifference, he cried:

"Can't you see that your silence leads to nothing--that it maddens me!"

"That is what I want it to do," returned Rhoda calmly.  "I shall be so
glad if I can make you suffer a touch of what I am enduring!"

Kut-le did not reply for a moment, then he began slowly:

"You imagine that I am not suffering?  Try to put yourself in my place
for a moment!  Can't you see how I love you?  Can't you see that my
stealing was the only thing that I could do, loving you so?  Wouldn't
you have done the same in my place?  If I had been a white man I
wouldn't have been driven to this.  I would have had an equal chance
with DeWitt and could have won easily.  But I had all the prejudice
against my alien race to fight.  There was but one thing to do: to take
you to the naked desert where you would be forced to see life as I see
it, where you would be forced to see me, the man, far from any false
standards of civilization."

Rhoda would have replied but Kut-le gave her no chance.

"I know what white conventions demand of me.  But, I tell you, my love
is above them.  I, not suffer!  Rhoda!  To see you in pain!  To see
your loathing of me!  To have you helpless in my arms and yet to keep
you safe!  Rhoda!  Rhoda!  Do you believe I do not suffer?"

Anger died out of Rhoda.  She saw tragedy in the situation, tragedy
that was not hers.  She saw herself and Kut-le racially, not
individually.  She saw Kut-le suffering all the helpless grief of race
alienation, saw him the victim of passions as great as the desires of
the alien races for the white always must be.  Rhoda forgot herself.
She laid a slender hand on Kut-le's.

"I am sorry," she said softly.  "I think I begin to understand.  But,
Kut-le, it can never, never be!  You are fighting a battle that was
lost when the white and Indian races were created.  It can never, never
be, Kut-le."

The strong brown hand had closed over the small white one instantly.

"It must be!" he said hoarsely.  "I put my whole life on it!  It must
be!"

Rhoda pulled her hand away gently.

"It never, never can be!"

"It shall be!  Love like this comes but seldom to a human.  It is the
most potent thing in the world.  It shall--"

"Kut-le!"  Alchise rode forward, pointing to the right.

Rhoda followed his look.  It was nearly dawn.  At the right was the
sheer wall of a mesa as smooth and impregnable to her eyes as a wall of
glass.  Moving toward them, silent as ghosts in the veil-like dawn, and
cutting them from the mesa, was a group of horsemen.

CHAPTER IX

TOUCH AND GO

The John DeWitt who helped break camp after finding Rhoda's scarf was a
different man from the half-crazed person of the three days previous.
He had begun to hope.  Somehow that white scarf with Rhoda's perfume
clinging to it was a living thing to him, a living, pulsing promise
that Rhoda was helping him to find her.  Now, while Jack and Billy were
feverishly eager, he was cool and clear-headed, leaving the leadership
to Billy still, yet doing more than his share of the work in preparing
for the hard night ahead of them.  The horses were well watered, their
own canteens were filled and saturated and food so prepared that it
could be eaten from the saddle.

"For," said Porter, "when we do hit the little girl's trail, starvation
or thirst or high hell ain't goin' to stop us!"

It was mid-afternoon when they started down the mountainside.  There
was no trail and going was painful but the men moved with the care of
desperation.  Once in the cañon they moved slowly along the wall and
some two miles from where the scarf had been found, they discovered a
fault where climbing was possible.  It was nearing sundown when they
reached a wide ledge where the way was easy.  Porter led the way back
over this to the spot below which fluttered a white paper to mark the
place where the scarf had been found.  The ledge deepened here to make
room for a tiny, bubbling spring.  Giant boulders were scattered across
the rocky floor.

The three men dismounted.  The ledge gave no trace of human occupancy
and yet Porter and Jack nodded at each other.

"Here was his camp, all right.  Water, and no one could come within a
mile of him without his being seen."

"He's still covering his traces carefully," said Jack.

"Not so very," answered Porter.  "He's banking a whole lot on our
stupidity, but Miss Tuttle beat him to it with her scarf."

The three men treated the ledge to a microscopic examination but they
found no trace of previous occupation until Billy knelt and put his
nose against a black outcropping of stone in the wall.  Then he gave a
satisfied grunt.

"Come here, Jack, and take a sniff."

Jack knelt obediently and cried excitedly:

"It smells of smoke, by Jove!  Don't it, John, old scout!"

"They knew smoke wouldn't show against a black outcrop, but they didn't
bank on my nose!" said Billy complacently.  "Come ahead, boys."

A short distance from the spring they found a trail which led back up
the mountain, and as dusk came on they followed its dizzy turns until
darkness forced them to halt and wait until the moon rose.  By its
light they moved up into a piñon forest.

"Let's wait here until daylight," suggested Jack.  "It's a good place
for a camp."

"No, it's too near the ledge," objected Billy.  "Of course we are
working on faith mostly.  I'm no Sherlock Holmes.  We'll keep to the
backbone of this range for a while.  It's the wildest spot in New
Mexico.  Kut-le will avoid the railroad over by the next range."

So Billy led his little band steadfastly southward.  At dawn they met a
Mexican shepherd herding his sheep in a grassy cañon.  Jack Newman
called to him eagerly and the Mexican as eagerly answered.  A visitor
was worth a month's pay to the lonely fellow.  The red of dawn was
painting the fleecy backs of his charges as the tired Americans rode
into his little camp.

"Seen anything of an Injun running away with a white girl?" asked Billy
without preliminaries.

The Mexican's jaw dropped.

"_Sacra Maria_!" he gasped.  "Not I!  Who is she?"

"Listen!" broke in Jack.  "You be on the watch.  An educated Indian has
stolen a young lady who was visiting my wife.  I own the Newman ranch.
That Indian Cartwell it was, three days ago."

John DeWitt interrupted.

"If you can catch that Indian, if you can give us a clue to him, you
needn't herd sheep any more.  Lord, man, speak up!  Don't stand there
like a chump!"

"But, señors!" stammered the poor fellow to whom this sudden torrent of
conversation was as overwhelming as a cloudburst.  "But I have not
seen--"

Billy Porter spoke again.

"Hold up, boys!  We are scaring the poor devil to death.  Friend
pastor," he said, "we'll have breakfast here with you, if you don't
object, and tell you our troubles."

The shepherd glowed with hospitality.

"Yonder is good water and I have tortillas and frijoles."

Unshaven and dirty, gaunt from lack of sleep, the three men dismounted
wearily and gladly turned their coffee and bacon over to the herder to
whom the mere odor of either was worth any amount of service.  As they
ate, Jack and Billy quizzed the Mexican as to the topography of the
surrounding country.  The little herder was a canny chap.

"He will not try to cover his trail carefully now," he said, swallowing
huge slabs of bacon.  "He has a good start.  You will have to fool him.
He sleeps by day and travels by night, you will see.  You are working
too hard and your horses will be dead.  You should have slept last
night.  Now you will lose today because you must rest your horses."

Porter looked at his two companions.  Jack was doing fairly well, but
the calm that DeWitt had found with Rhoda's scarf had deserted him.  He
was eating scarcely anything and stared impatiently at the fire,
waiting for the start.

"I'm a blamed double-action jackass, with a peanut for a mind!"
exclaimed Porter.  "Taking on myself to lead this hunt when I don't
_sabe_ frijoles!  We take a sleep now."

DeWitt jumped to his feet, expostulating, but Jack and Billy laid a
hand on either of his shoulders and forced him to lie down on his
blanket.  There nature claimed her own and in a short time the poor
fellow was in the slumber of exhaustion.

"Poor old chap!" said Jack as he spread his own blanket.  "I can't help
thinking all the time 'What if it were Katherine!'  Dear old Rhoda!
Why, Billy, we used to play together as kids!  She's slapped my face,
many a time!"

"Probably you deserved it!" answered Billy in an uncertain voice.  "By
the limping piper!  I'm glad I ain't her financier.  I'm most crazy, as
it is!"

The sheep herder woke the sleepers at noon.  After a bath at the
spring, and dinner, the trio felt as if reborn.  They left the herder
with minute directions as to what he was to do in case he heard of
Rhoda.  Then they rode out of the cañon into the burning desert.

And now for several days they lost all clues.  They beat up and down
the ranges like tired hunting-dogs, all their efforts fruitless.
Little by little, panic and excitement left them.  Even DeWitt realized
that the hunt was to be a long and serious one as Porter told of the
fearful chases the Apaches had led the whites, time and again.  He
began to realize that to keep alive in the terrible region through
which the hunt was set he must help the others to conserve their own
and his energies.  To this end they ate and slept as regularly as they
could.

Occasionally they met other parties of searchers, but this was only
when they beat to the eastward toward the ranch, for most of the
searchers were now convinced that Kut-le had made toward Mexico and
they were patrolling the border.  But Billy insisted that Kut-le was
making for some eerie that he knew and would ensconce himself there for
months, if need be, till the search was given up.  Then and then only
would he make for Mexico.  And John DeWitt and Jack had come to agree
with Billy.

"He'll keep her up in some haunt of his," said Jack, again and again,
"until he's worn her into consenting to marry him.  And before that
happens, if I know old Rhoda, we'll find them."

"He's mine when we do find him, remember that," John DeWitt always said
through his teeth at this point in the discussion.

It was on the twelfth day of the hunt that the sheep-herder found them.
They were cinching up the packs after the noon rest when he rode up on
a burro.  He was dust-coated and both he and the burro were panting.

"I've seen her!  I've seen the señorita!" he shouted as he clambered
stiffly from the burro.

The three Americans stood rigid.

"Where?  How?  When?" came from three heat-cracked mouths.

The Mexican started to answer, but his throat was raw with alkali dust
and his voice was scarcely audible.  DeWitt impatiently thrust a
canteen into the little fellow's hands.

"Hurry, for heaven's sake!" he urged.

The Mexican took a deep draught.

"The night after you left I moved up into the peaks, intending to cross
the range to lower pastures next day.  A big storm came up and I made
camp.  Then an Indian in a blanket rode up to me and asked me if I was
alone.  I _sabed_ him at once.  'But yes, señor,'" I answered, "'except
for the sheep!'"

"But Miss Tuttle!  The señorita!" shouted DeWitt.

The Mexican glanced at the tired blue eyes, the strained face,
pityingly.

"She was well," he answered.  "Be patient, señor.  Then there rode up
another Indian, two squaws and what looked to be a young boy.  The
Indian lifted the boy from the saddle so tenderly, señors.  And it was
your señorita!  She did not look strong, yet I think the Indian is
taking good care of her.  They sat by the fire till the storm was over.
The señorita ignored Kut-le as if he had been a dog."

Porter clinched his teeth at this, while Jack murmured with a gleam of
savage satisfaction in his eyes, "Old Rhoda!"  But DeWitt only gnawed
his lip, with his blue eyes on the Mexican.

"The Indian said I was to say nothing, but the señorita made him let me
tell about you after I said I had seen you.  She--she cried with
happiness.  They rode away in a little while but I followed as long as
I dared to leave my sheep.  They were going north.  I think they were
in the railroad range the night you were with me, then doubled back.  I
left my sheep the next day with the salt-boy who came up.  I tramped
twenty miles to the rancho and got a burro and left word about the
señorita.  Then I started on your trail.  Everyone I met I told.  I
thought that my news was not worth much except that the señor there
would be glad to know that the Indian is tender to his señorita."

DeWitt turned to Porter and Newman.

"Friends, perhaps she is being taken care of!" he said.  "Perhaps that
devil is trying to keep her health, at least.  God!  If nothing worse
has befallen her!"

He stopped and drew his wrist across his forehead.  Something like
tears shone in Jack's eyes, and Porter coughed.  John turned to the
Mexican and grasped the little fellow's hand.

"My boy," he said, "you'll never regret this day's work.  If you have a
señorita you know what you have done for me!"

The Mexican looked up into DeWitt's face seriously.

"I have one.  She has a dimple in her chin."

John turned abruptly and stood staring into the desert while tears
seared his eyes.  Billy hastily unpacked and gave Carlos and his burro
the best that the outfit afforded.

"Can the salt-boy stay on with the sheep while you come with us?" asked
John DeWitt.  "I'll pay your boss for the whole flock if anything goes
wrong."  He wanted the keen wit of the herder on the hunt.

The Mexican nodded eagerly.

"I'll stay!"

Shortly the four were riding northward across the desert.  They were in
fairly good shape for a hard tide.  Two days before, they had stopped
at Squaw Spring ranch and re-outfitted.  With proper care of the horses
they were good for three weeks away from supplies.  And for two weeks
now they scoured the desert, meeting scarcely a human, finding none of
the traces that Rhoda was so painfully dropping along her course.  The
hugeness, the cruelty of the region drove the hopelessness of their
mission more and more deeply into DeWitt's brain.  It seemed impossible
except by the merest chance to find trace of another human in a waste
so vast.  It seemed to him that it was not skill but the gambler's
instinct for luck that guided Carlos and Billy.

They rode through open desert country one afternoon, the only mountains
discernible being a far purple haze along the horizon.  For hours the
little cavalcade had moved without speech.  Then to the north, Porter
discerned a dot moving toward them.  Gradually under their eager eyes
the dot grew into a man who staggered as he walked.  When he observed
the horsemen coming toward him he sat down and waited.

"Jim Provenso!  By the limping Piper!" cried Billy.  "Thought you was
in Silver City."

Jim was beyond useless speech.  He caught the canteen which Jack swung
to him and drank deeply.  Then he said hoarsely:

"I almost got away with the Tuttle girl last week!"

Every man left his saddle as if at a word of command.  Jim took another
drink.

"If I catch that Injun alone I'll cut his throat!"

"Was Miss Tuttle bad off?" gasped Porter.

"She?  Naw; she looked fine.  He sassed me, though, as I won't take it
from any man!"

"Tell us what happened, for heaven's sake," cried DeWitt, eying
Provenso disgustedly.

Jim told his story in detail.

"That Injun Alkus," he ended, "he tied a rag over my eyes, tied my
hands up and, say, he lost me for fair!  He took all day to it.  At
night he tied me up to a tree and I stood there all night before I got
my hands loose.  I was sure lost, now, I can tell you!  I struck a
cowman up on the range the next night.  He give me some grub and a
canteen and I made out pretty good till yesterday, working south all
the time.  Then I got crazy with thirst and threw my canteen away.
Found a spring last night again, but I'm about all in."

"How did Miss Tuttle seem?" asked John with curious quietness.  It
seemed to him the strangest thing of all that first the Mexican, then
this coarse, tramp-like fellow, should have talked to Rhoda while he
could only wander wildly through the Hades of the desert without a
trace of her camp to solace him.

"Say, she was looking good!  She thanked me and told me to tell you all
to hurry."

They gave to Provenso a burro whose pack was nearly empty, what food
and water they could spare, and he left them.  They started on
dejectedly.  Provenso had told them where Kut-le had camped ten days
before.

They could only find that spot and attempt to pick up the trail from
there.

"Just the same," said Billy, "it's just as well he didn't get away with
Miss Rhoda.  He's a tough pill, that Provenso.  She'd better be with
the Injun than him!"

"Provenso must be a bad lot," said Jack.

"He is!" replied Billy grimly.

The camp was made that night near a smooth-faced mesa.  Before dawn
they had eaten breakfast and were mounting, when Carlos gave a low
whistle.  Every ear was strained.  On the exquisite stillness of the
dawn sounded a woman's voice which a man's voice answered.

CHAPTER X

A LONG TRAIL

Rhoda gave a cry of joy.  From the horsemen rose a sudden shout.

"Spread!  Spread!  There they are!"

"Don't shoot!"  It was Porter's voice, shrill and high with excitement.
"That's her, the boy there!  Rhoda!  Rhoda!  We're coming!"

With a quick responsive cry, Rhoda struck her horse.  With the blow,
Kut-le leaned from his own horse and seized her bridle, turning her
horse with his own away from the mesa and to the left.  The other
Indians followed and with hoarse cries of exultation the rescuers took
up the pursuit.

Rhoda looked back.

"Shoot!" she screamed.  "Shoot!"

Before the second scream had left her lips she was lifted bodily from
the saddle to Kut-le's arms where, understanding his device, she
struggled like a mad woman.  But she only wasted her strength.  Without
a glance at her, Kut-le turned his pony almost in its tracks and made
for the mesa.

"Cut him off!  He'll get away from us!"  It was DeWitt's voice, and
"John!  John DeWitt!"  Rhoda cried.

But the young Indian had gaged his distance well.  He brought his horse
to its haunches and with Rhoda in his arms was running into a fissure
seemingly too narrow for human to enter, while the pursuers were still
a hundred yards away.

"Hold 'em, Alchise!" he said briefly as he ran.

Alchise, with rifle cocked, stopped by the opening.  The fissure
widened immediately into a narrow passageway.  High, high above them
rolled a strip of pink and blue morning sky.  Before them was a
seemingly interminable crevice along which the squaws scuttled.  As
Rhoda watched them they disappeared around a sudden curve.  When Kut-le
reached this point with his burden, the squaws were climbing like
monkeys up the wall which here gave back, roughly, ending the fissure
in a rude chimney which it seemed to Rhoda only a bear or an Apache
could have climbed.  Kut-le set Rhoda on her feet.  She looked up into
his face mockingly.  To her mind she was as good as rescued.  But the
young Apache seemed in no wise hurried or excited.

"Our old friends seem to want something!" he commented with his boyish
grin.

"What are you going to do now?" asked Rhoda, with calm equal to the
Apache's.

"I can't carry you up this wall," suggested Kut-le.

"Very well!" returned Rhoda pleasantly.  "I am quite willing that you
should leave me here."

Kut-le's eyes glittered.

"Rhoda, you must climb this wall with me!"

"I won't!" replied Rhoda laconically.

"Then I shall force you to," said the Indian, shifting his rifle and
prodding Rhoda ever so gently with the barrel.

Rhoda gave Kut-le a look of scorn that he was not soon to forget and
slowly mounted the first broken ledge.  The wall was composed of a
series of jutting rocks and of ledges that barely offered hand or foot
hold.  Up and up and up!  Kut-le was now beside her, now above her, now
lifting, now pulling.  Half-way to the top, Rhoda stopped, dizzy and
afraid.  Kneeling on the ledge above, with one hand thrust down to lift
her, Kut-le looked into her eyes almost pleadingly.  That handsome face
so close to hers affected Rhoda strangely.

"Don't be afraid," whispered Kut-le.  "Nothing can happen to you while
I am taking care of you."

Rhoda looked into his eyes proudly.

"I am not afraid," she said, reaching for a fresh handhold with
trembling fingers.

The jutting rocks were sharp.  Kut-le from his ledge saw Rhoda look at
her hold then turn white.  Her nails were torn to the quick and
bleeding.  She swayed with only an atom of gravity lacking to send her
to death below.  Instantly Kut-le was back beside her, his sinewy hand
between her shoulders, supporting and lifting her to the ledge above.
As they neared the top the broken surface became prickly with cactus
and Rhoda winced with misery as the thorns pierced and tore her flesh.
But finally, in what actually had been an incredibly short time, they
emerged on the plateau, where the two squaws huddled high above the
pursuers.

"They think they have you now!" said Kut-le, as Rhoda dropped panting
to the ground.  "We must move out of here before they investigate the
mesa top."

He allowed, however, a few minutes' breathing spell for Rhoda.  She sat
quietly, though her gray eyes were brilliant with excitement.  It
seemed to her but a matter of a few hours now when she would be with
her own.  Yet she could not but notice with that curious observance of
detail which comes at moments of intensest excitement the varied colors
of the distances that opened before her.  The great mesa on which she
sat was a mighty peninsula of chalcedony that stretched into the
desert.  It was patched by rocks of lavender, of yellow, and of green,
and belled over by the intensity of the morning blue above.

"Come!" said Kut-le.  "There will be little rest for us today."

Rhoda rose, took a few staggering steps, then sat down.

"I can't start yet," she said.  "I'm too worn out."

Kut-le's expression was amused while it was impatient.

"I suppose you may be sleepy, but I think you can walk a little way.
Hurry, Rhoda!  Hurry!"

Rhoda sat staring calmly into the palpitating blue above.

"I hate to have you carry me," she said after a moment, "but I don't
feel at all like walking!"

Her tired face was irresistibly lovely as she looked up at the Apache,
but by an effort he remained obdurate.

"You must walk as long as you can," he insisted.  "We have got to
hustle today!"

"I really don't feel like hustling!" sighed Rhoda.

"Rhoda!" cried Kut-le impatiently, "get up and walk after me!  Cesca,
see that the white squaw keeps moving!" and he handed his rifle to the
brown hag who took it with evident pleasure.  Molly ran forward as if
to protest but at a look from Kut-le she dropped back.

Rhoda rose slowly, with her lower lip caught between her teeth.  She
followed silently after Kut-le, Cesca and the rifle at her shoulder and
Molly in the rear.  It seemed to the girl that of all the strange
scenes through which the past weeks had carried her this was of all the
most unreal.  All about her was a world of vivid rock heaps so
intensely colored that she doubted her vision.  Away to the south lay
the boundless floor of the desert, a purple and gold infinity that
rolled into the horizon.  Far to the north mountains were faintly blue
in the yellow sunlight.

Kut-le headed straight for the mountains.  His pace was swift and
unrelenting.  Almost immediately Rhoda felt the debilitating effects of
overheat.  The sun, now sailing high, burned through her flannel shirt
until her flesh was blistered beneath it.  The light on the brilliantly
colored rocks made her eyes blink with pain.  Before long she was
parched with thirst and faint with hunger.  This was her first
experience in tramping for any distance under the desert sun.  But
Kut-le kept the pace long after the two squaws were half leading, half
carrying the girl.

Rhoda had long since learned the uselessness of protesting.  She kept
on until the way danced in reeling colors before her eyes.  Then
without a sound she dropped in the scant shadow of a rock.  At the cry
from Molly, Kut-le turned, and after one glance at Rhoda's white face
and limp figure he knelt in the sand and lifted the drooping, yellow
head.  Molly unslung her canteen and forced a few drops of water
between Rhoda's lips.  Then she tenderly chafed the small hands and the
delicate throat and Rhoda opened her eyes.  Immediately Kut-le lifted
her in his arms and the flight was resumed.

At short intervals during the morning, Rhoda walked, but for the most
part Kut-le packed her as dispassionately as if she had been a lame
puppy.  He held her across his broad chest as if her fragile weight
were nothing.  Lying so, Rhoda watched the merciless landscape or the
brown squaws jogging at Kut-le's heels.  Surely, she thought, the
ancient mesa never had seen a stranger procession or known of a wilder
mission.  She looked up into Kut-le's face and wondered as she stared
at his bare head how his eyes could look so steadily into the
sun-drenched landscape.

As she lay, the elation of the early morning left her.  More and more
surely the conviction came to her that the Apache's boast was true;
that no white could catch him on his own ground.  Dizzy and ill from
the heat, she closed her eyes and lay without hope or coherent thought.

At noon they stopped for a short time that Rhoda might eat.  Their
resting-place was in the shadow of a beetling, weather-beaten rock that
still bore traces of hieroglyphic carvings.  There were broken bits of
clay pots among the tufts of cactus.  Rhoda stared at them languidly
and wondered what the forgotten vessels could have contained in a
region so barren of life or hope.

Kut-le strolled over to a cat's-claw bush at whose base lay a tangle of
dead leaves.  With a bit of stick, he scattered this litter, struck the
ground several good blows and returned with a string of fat desert
mice.  With infinite care Cesca kindled a fire so tiny, so clear, that
scarcely a wisp of smoke escaped into the quivering air.  Into this she
flung the eviscerated mice and in an instant the tiny things were a
delicate brown.  The aroma was pleasant but Rhoda turned whiter still
when Molly brought her the fattest of the mice.

"Take it away!" she whispered.  "Take it away!"

Molly looked at the girl in stupid surprise.

"You must eat, Rhoda girl!" said Kut-le.

Rhoda made no reply but leaned limply against the ancient rock, her
golden hair touching the crude drawings of long ago.  She was a very
different Rhoda from the eager girl of the early morning.  She ignored
every effort Kut-le made to tempt her to eat.  Her tired gaze wandered
to her hands, still blood-grimed, and her cleft chin quivered.  Kut-le
saw the expressive little look.

"I'm sorry," he said simply.

Rhoda looked up at him.

"I don't believe you," she returned calmly.

The Indian's jaw stiffened.

"Come, we'll start now."

The afternoon was like the morning, except that the sun was more
burning overhead, the way more scorching underfoot; except that the
course became more broken, the clambering heavier, the drops more
wracking.  All the afternoon, Kut-le carried Rhoda.  At last the sun
sank below the mesa and the day was ended.

The place of their camping seemed to Rhoda damp and cold.  It was close
beside a spring that gave out a faint, miasmic odor.  The bitter water
was grateful, however.  Again more mice were seered over before the
fire was stamped out hastily.  This time Rhoda forced herself to eat.
Then she drank deeply of the bitter water and lay down on the cold
ground.  Despite the fact that she was shivering with the cold, she
fell asleep at once.  Toward midnight she awoke and moving close to
Molly's broad back for warmth, she looked up into the sky.  For the
first time the great southern stars seemed near and kindly to her and
before she fell asleep again she wondered why.

At earliest peep of dawn the squaws were astir waiting for Kut-le, who
shortly staggered into camp with a load of meat on his shoulder.
Alchise was with him.

"Mule meat!" said Kut-le to Rhoda.  "I went to find horses but there
was nothing but an old lame mule, I brought him back this way!"

"Heavens!" ejaculated Rhoda.

The squaws worked busily, cutting the meat into strips which they hung
over their shoulders to sun dry during the day.  Alchise cleansed a
length of mule's intestine in the spring, to serve as a canteen.  Rhoda
gave small heed to these preparations.  She was too ill and feverish
even to be disgusted by them.  She refused to eat but drank constantly
from the spring.  When at Kut-le's command she took up the march with
the others the young man eyed her anxiously.  He slung Molly's canteen
from his own to Alchise's shoulder and felt Rhoda's pulse.

"This water was bad for you," he said.  "But it was the only spring
within miles.  Perhaps you will throw off the effects of it when we get
into the heat of the sun."

Rhoda made no reply but staggered miserably after Molly.  The spring
lay in a pocket between mountains and mesa.  The mountains seemed
cruelly high to Rhoda as she looked at them and thought of toiling
across them.  With head sunk on her breast and feverishly twitching
hands she followed for half an hour.  Then Kut-le turned.

"I'm going to carry you, Rhoda," he said.

The girl shrank away from him.

"You and Molly and all of them think I'm just a parasite," she
muttered.  "You don't have to do anything for me!  Just let me drop
anywhere and die!"

Kut-le looked at her strangely.  Without comment, he picked her up.
There was a sternly tender look on his face that never had been there
before.  He did not carry her dispassionately today, but very gently.
Something in his manner pierced through Rhoda's half delirium and she
looked up at him with a faint replica of her old lovely smile that
Kut-le had not seen since he had stolen her.  He trembled at its beauty
and started forward at a tremendous pace.

"I'll get you to good water by noon," he said.

At noon they were well up in the mountains by a clear spring fringed
with aspens.  Watercress grew below it, and high above it were pines
and junipers.  It was a spot of surpassing loveliness, but Rhoda,
tossing and panting, could not know it, Kut-le laid his burden on the
ground and Molly drew off her tattered petticoat to lay beneath the
feverish head.  The young Apache stood looking down at the little
figure, so graceful in its boyish abandonment of gesture, so pitiful in
its broken unconsciousness.  Molly bathed the burning face and hands in
the pure cold water, muttering tender Apache phrases.  Kut-le
constantly interrupted her to change the girl's position.  For an hour
or so he waited for the fever to turn.  By three o'clock there was no
change for the better and he left Rhoda's side to pace back and forth
by the spring in anxious thought.

At last he came to a conclusion and with stern set face he issued a few
short orders to his companions.  The canteens were refilled.  Kut-le
lifted Rhoda and the trail was taken to the west.  Alchise would have
relieved him of his burden, willingly, but Kut-le would not listen to
it.  Molly trotted anxiously by the young Apache's side, constantly
moistening the girl's lips with water.

Rhoda was quite delirious now.  She murmured and sometimes sobbed,
trying to free herself from Kut-le's arms.

"I'm not sick!" she said, looking up into the Indian's face with
unseeing eyes.  "Don't let him see that I am sick!"

"No!  No!  Dear one!" answered Kut-le.

"Don't let him see I'm sick!" she sobbed.  "He hurts me so!"

"No!  No!" exclaimed Kut-le huskily.  "Molly, give her a little more
water!"

"Molly!" panted Rhoda, "you tell him how hard I worked--how I earned my
way a little!  And don't let him do anything for me!"

CHAPTER XI

THE TURN IN THE TRAIL

The little group, trudging the long difficult trail along the mountain
was a rich study in degrees: Rhoda, the fragile Caucasian, a product of
centuries of civilization; and Kut-le, the Indian, with the keenness,
the ferocious courage, the cunning of the Indian leavened inextricably
with the thousand softening influences of a score of years' contact
with civilization; then Cesca, the lean and stoical product of an
ancient and terrible savagery; and Alchise, her mate.  Finally
Molly--squat, dirty Molly--the stupid, squalid aborigine, as distinct
from Cesca's type as is the brown snail from the stinging wasp.

Alchise, striding after his chief, was smitten with a sudden idea.
After ruminating on it for some time, he communicated it to his squaw.
Cesca shook her head with a grunt of disapproval.  Alchise insisted and
the squaw looked at Kut-le cunningly.

"_Quién sabe_?" she said at last.

At this Alchise hurried forward and touched Kut-le on the shoulder.

"Take 'em squaw to Reservation.  Medicine dance.  Squaw heap sick.
_Sabe_?"

"Reservation's too far away," replied Kut-le, shifting Rhoda's head to
lie more easily on his arm.  "I'm making for Chira."

Alchise shook his head vigorously.

"Too many mens!  We go Reservation.  Alchise help carry sick squaw."

"Nope!  You're way off, Alchise.  I'm going where I can get some white
man's medicine the quickest.  I'm not so afraid of getting caught as I
am of her getting a bad run of fever.  I have friends at Chira."

Alchise fell back, muttering disappointment.  White man's medicine was
no good.  He cared little about Rhoda but he adored Kut-le.  It was
necessary therefore that the white squaw be saved, since his chief
evidently was quite mad about her.  All the rest of the day Alchise was
very thoughtful.  Late at night the next halt was made.  High up in the
mountain on a sheltered ledge Kut-le laid down his burden.

"Keep her quiet till I get back," he said, and disappeared.

Rhoda was in a stupor and lay quietly unconscious with the stars
blinking down on her, a limp dark heap against the mountain wall.  The
three Indians munched mule meat, then Molly curled herself on the
ground and in three minutes was snoring.  Alchise stood erect and still
on the ledge for perhaps ten minutes after Kut-le's departure.  Then he
touched Cesca on the shoulder, lifted Rhoda in his arms and, followed
by Cesca, left the sleeping Molly alone on the ledge.

Swiftly, silently, Alchise strode up the mountainside, Rhoda making
neither sound nor motion.  For hours, with wonderful endurance the two
Indians held the pace.  They moved up the mountain to the summit, which
they crossed, then dropped rapidly downward.  Just at dawn Alchise
stopped at a gray _campos_ under some pines and called.  A voice from
the hut answered him.  The canvas flap was put back and an old Indian
buck appeared, followed by several squaws and young bucks, yawning and
staring.

Alchise laid Rhoda on the ground while he spoke rapidly to the Indian.
The old man protested at first but on the repeated use of Kut-le's name
he finally nodded and Alchise carried Rhoda into the _campos_.  A squaw
kindled a fire which, blazing up brightly, showed a huge, dark room,
canvas-roofed and dirt-floored, quite bare except for the soiled
blankets on the floor.

Rhoda was laid in the center of the hut.  The old buck knelt beside
her.  He was very old indeed.  His time-ravaged features were lean and
ascetic.  His clay-matted hair was streaked with white; his black eyes
were deep-sunk and his temples were hollow.  But there was a fine sort
of dignity about the old medicine-man, despite his squalor.  He gazed
on Rhoda in silence for some time.  Alchise and Cesca sat on the floor,
and little by little they were joined by a dozen other Indians who
formed a circle about the girl.  The firelight flickered on the dark,
intent faces and on Rhoda's delicate beauty as she lay passing rapidly
from stupor to delirium.

Suddenly the old man raised his lean hand, shaking a gourd filled with
pebbles, and began softly to chant.  Instantly the other Indians joined
him and the _campos_ was filled with the rhythm of a weird song.  Rhoda
tossed her arms and began to cough a little from the smoke.  The chant
quickened.  It was but the mechanical repetition of two notes falling
always from high to low.  Yet it had an indescribable effect of
melancholy, this aboriginal song.  It was as hopeless and melancholy as
all of nature's chants: the wail of the wind, the sob of the rain, the
beat of the waves.

Rhoda sat erect, her eyes wild and wide.  The old buck, without ceasing
his song, attempted to thrust her back with one lean brown claw, but
Rhoda struck him feebly.

"Go away!" she cried.  "Be quiet!  You hurt my head!  Don't make that
dreadful noise!"

The chant quickened.  The medicine-man now rocked back and forth on his
knees, accenting the throb of the song by beating his bare feet on the
earth.  He seemed by some strange suppleness to flatten his instep
paddle-wise and to bring the entire leg from toe to knee at one blow
against the ground.  Never did his glowing old eyes leave Rhoda's face.

The girl, thrown into misery and excitement by the insistence of the
chant, began to wring her hands.  The words said nothing to her but the
rhythmic repetition of the notes told her a story as old as life
itself: that life passes swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and without
hope; that our days are as grass and as the clouds that are consumed
and are no more; that the soul sinks to the land of darkness and of the
shadow of death.  Rhoda struggled, with horror in her eyes, to rise;
but the old man with a hand on her shoulder forced her back on the
blanket.

"Oh, what is it!" wailed Rhoda, clutching at the mass of yellow-brown
hair about her face.  "Where am I?  What are you doing?  Have I died?
Where is Kut-le?  Kut-le!" she screamed.  "Kut-le!"

The medicine-man held her to the blanket and for a time she sat
quiescent.  Then as the Indian lifted his hand from her shoulder the
bewilderment of her gray eyes changed to the wildness of delirium.  She
looked toward the doorway where the dawn light made but little headway
against the dark interior.  With one blue-veined hand on her panting
breast she slowly, stealthily gathered herself together, and with
unbelievable swiftness she sprang for the square of dawn light.  She
leaped almost into the arms of a young buck who sat near the door.  He
bore her back to her place while the chant continued without
interruption.

Exhausted, Rhoda lay listening to the song.  Gradually it began to
exert its hypnotic influence over her.  Its sense of melancholy
enveloped her drug-like.  She lay prone, the tears coursing down her
cheeks, her twitching hands turned upward beside her.  Slowly she
floated outward upon a dark sea whose waves beat a ceaseless requiem of
anguish on her ears.  It seemed to her that she was enduring all the
sorrows of the ages; that she was brain-tortured by the death agonies
of all humanity; that all the uselessness, all the meaninglessness, all
the utter weariness of the death-ridden world pressed upon her,
suffocating her, forcing her to stillness, slowing the beating of her
heart, the intake of her breath.  Slowly her white lids closed, yet
with one last conscious cry for life:

"Kut-le!" she wailed.  "Kut-le!"

A quick shadow filled the doorway.

"Here, Rhoda!  Here!"

Kut-le bounded into the room, upsetting the medicine-man, and lifted
Rhoda in his arms.  She clung to him wildly.

"Take me away, Kut-le!  Take me away!"

He soothed her with great tenderness.

"Dear one!" he murmured.  "Dear one!" and she closed her eyes quietly.

During this time the Indians sat silent and watchful.  Kut-le turned to
Alchise.

"You cursed fool!" he said.

"She get well now," replied Alchise anxiously.   "Alchise save her for
you.  Molly tell you where come."

For a moment Kut-le stared at Alchise; then, as if realizing the
futility of speech, "Come!" he said, and ignoring the other Indians, he
strode from the _campos_.  Alchise and Cesca followed him, and outside
the anxious Molly seized Rhoda's limp hand with a little cry of joy.
Kut-le led the way to a quiet spot among the pines.  Here he laid Rhoda
on a sheepskin and covered her with a tattered blanket, the spoils of
his previous night's trip.

About the middle of the morning Rhoda opened her eyes.  As she stirred,
Kut-le came to her.

"I've had such horrible dreams, Kut-le.  You won't go and leave me to
the Indians again?"

This appeal from Rhoda in her weakness almost overcame Kut-le but he
only smoothed her tangled hair and answered:

"No, dear one!"

"Where are we now?" she asked feebly.

Kut-le smiled.

"In the Rockies."

"I think I am very sick," continued Rhoda.  "Do you think we can stay
quiet in one place today?"

Kut-le shook his head.

"I am going to get you to some quinine as quick as I can.  There is
some about twenty-four hours from here."

Rhoda's eyes widened.

"Shall I be with white people?"

"Don't bother.  You'll have good care."

The light faded from Rhoda's eyes.

"It's hard for me, isn't it?" she said, as if appealing to the college
man of the ranch.

"Rhoda!  Rhoda!" whispered Kut-le, "your suffering kills me!  But I
must have you, I must!"

Rhoda moved her head impatiently, as if the Indian's tense, handsome
face annoyed her.  She refused food but drank deeply of the tepid water
and shortly they were again on the trail.

For several hours Rhoda lay in Kut-le's arms, weak and ill but with
lucid mind.  They were making their way up a long cañon.  It was very
narrow.  Rhoda could see the individual leaves of the aspens on the
opposite wall as they moved close in the shadow of the other.  The
floor, watered by a clear brook, was level and green.  On either side
the walls were murmurous with delicately quivering aspens and sighing
pines.

Suddenly Cesca gave a grunt of warning.  Far down the valley a
sheep-herder was approaching with his flocks.  Kut-le turned to the
right and Alchise sprang to his aid.  In the shelter of the trees,
Kut-le twisted a handkerchief across Rhoda's mouth; and in reply to her
outraged eyes, he said:

"I don't mind single visitors as a rule but I haven't time to fuss with
one now."

Together the two men carried Rhoda up the cañon-side.  They lifted her
from trunk to trunk, now a root-hold, now a jutting bit of rock, till
far up the sheer wall.  Rhoda lay at last on a little ledge heaped with
pine-needles.  By the time the Indians were settled on the rock Rhoda
was delirious again.  The fever had returned twofold and Molly's entire
efforts were toward keeping the tossing form on the ledge.

Slowly, very slowly, the herder, a sturdy ragged Mexican, moved up the
cañon, pausing now and again to scratch his head.  He was whistling _La
Paloma_.  The Indians' black eyes did not leave him and after his
flute-like notes had melted into the distance they still crouched in
cramped stillness on the ledge.

But shortly Kut-le freed Rhoda's mouth, gave Alchise a swift look, and
with infinite care the descent was begun.  Kut-le did not like
traveling in the daylight, for many reasons.  Carefully, swiftly they
moved up the cañon, always hugging the wall.  Late in the afternoon
they emerged on an open mesa.  All the wretched day Rhoda had traveled
in a fearsome world of her own, peopled with uncanny figures, alight
with a glare that seared her eyes, held in a vice that gripped her
until she screamed with restless pain.  The song that the shepherd had
whistled tortured her tired brain.

  "The day that I left my home for the rolling sea,
  I said, 'Mother dear, O pray to thy God for me!'
  But e'er we set sail I went a fond leave to take--"

Over and over she sang the three lines, ending each time with a
frightened stare up into Kut-le's face.

"Whom did I say good-by to?  Whom?  But they don't care!"

Then again the tired voice:

  "The day that I left my home for the rolling sea--"

Night came and the weary, weary crossing of a craggy, heavily wooded
mountain.  Kut-le did not relinquish his burden.  He seemed not to tire
of the weight of the slender body that lay now in helpless stupor.  If
the squaws or Alchise felt fatigue or impatience as Kut-le held them to
a pace on the tortuous trail that would nearly have exhausted a
Caucasian athlete, they gave no sign.  All the endless night Kut-le led
the way under the midnight blackness of the piñon or the violet light
of the stars, until the lifting light of the dawn found them across the
ranges and standing at the edge of a little river.

In the dim light there lifted a terraced adobe building with ladders
faintly outlined on the terraces.  There was no sound save the barking
of a dog and the ripple of the river.  With a muttered admonition,
Kut-le left Rhoda to the others and climbed one of the ladders.  He
returned with a blanketed figure that gazed on Rhoda non-committally.
At a sign, Kut-le lifted Rhoda, and the little group moved noiselessly
toward the dwelling, clambered up a ladder, and disappeared.

Rhoda opened her eyes with a sense of physical comfort that confused
her.  She was lying on the floor of a long, gray-walled room.  In one
corner was a tiny adobe fire-place from which a tinier fire threw a jet
of flame color on the Navajo that lay before the hearth.  Along the
walls were benches with splendid Navajos rolled cushion-wise upon them.
Above the benches hung several rifles with cougarskin quivers beneath
them.  A couple of cheap framed mirrors were hung with silver necklaces
of beautiful workmanship.  In a corner a table was set with heavy but
shining china dishes.

Rhoda stared with increasing wonder.  She was very weak and spent but
her head was clear.  She lifted her arms and looked at them.  She was
wearing a loose-fitting gray garment of a strange weave.  She fingered
it, more and more puzzled.

"You wake now?" asked a low voice.

Coming softly down the room was an Indian woman of comely face and
strange garb.  Over a soft shirt of cut and weave such as Rhoda had on,
she wore a dark overdress caught at one shoulder and reaching only to
the knees.  A many-colored girdle confined the dress at the waist.  Her
legs and feet were covered with high, loose moccasins.  Her black hair
hung free on her shoulders.

"You been much sick," the woman went on, "much sick," stooping to
straighten Rhoda's blanket.

"Where am I?" asked Rhoda.

"At Chira.  You eat breakfast?"

Rhoda caught the woman's hand.

"Who are you?" she asked.  "You have been very good to me."

"Me Marie," replied the woman.

"Where are Kut-le and the others?"

"Kut-le here.  Others in mountain.  You much sick, three days."

Rhoda sighed.  Would this kaleidoscope of misery never end!

"I am very tired of it all," she said.  "I think it would have been
kinder if you had let me die.  Will you help me to get back to my white
friends?"

Marie shook her head.

"Kut-le friend.  We take care Kut-le's squaw."

Rhoda turned wearily on her side.

"Go away and let me sleep," she said.

CHAPTER XII

THE CROSSING TRAILS

As Kut-le, with Rhoda in his arms, disappeared into the mesa fissure,
John DeWitt threw himself from his horse and was at the opening before
the others had more than brought their horses to their haunches.

He was met by Alchise's rifle, with Alchise entirely hidden from view.
For a moment the four men stood panting and speechless.  The encounter
had been so sudden, so swift that they could not believe their senses.
Then Billy Porter uttered an oath that reverberated from the rocky wall.

"They will get to the top!" he cried.  "Jack, you and DeWitt get up
there!  Carlos and I will hold this!"

The two men mounted immediately and galloped along the mesa wall,
looking for an ascent.  Neither of them spoke but both were breathing
hard, and through his blistered skin DeWitt's cheeks glowed feverishly.
For a mile up and down from the fissure the wall was a blank, except
for a single wide split which did not come within fifty feet of the
ground.  After over half an hour of frantic search, DeWitt found,
nearly three miles from the fissure, a rough spot where the wall gave
back in a few narrow crumbling ledges.

"We'll have to leave the horses," he said, "and try that."

Jack nodded tensely.  They dismounted, pulled the reins over the
horses' heads and started up the wall, John leading, carefully.  One
bitter lesson the desert was teaching him: haste in the hot country
spells ruin!  So, though Rhoda's voice still rang in his ears, though
the sight of the slender boyish figure struggling in Kut-le's arms
still ravished his eyes, he worked carefully.

The ascent was all but impossible.  The few jutting ledges were so
narrow that foothold was precarious, so far apart that only the slight
backward slant of the wall made it possible for them to flatten their
bodies against the crumbling brown rock and thus keep from falling.
They toiled desperately, silently.  After an hour of utmost effort,
they reached the top, and with an exclamation of exultation started in
the direction of the fissure.  But their exultation was short-lived.
The great split that stopped fifty feet from the desert floor cut them
off from the main mesa.  They ran hastily along its edge but at no
point was it to be crossed.  Shortly DeWitt left Jack to follow it back
and he hastened to the mesa front where he made a perilous descent and
returned with the horses to Porter.

That gentleman forced John to eat some breakfast while Carlos rode
hastily to scour the mesa front to the west.  Porter and the Mexican
had captured two of the horses and the burro that the Indians had left.
The other horses had run out into the desert back to the last spring
they had camped at, Porter said.  To DeWitt's great disappointment, the
horses carried only blankets, and the burro was loaded with bacon and
flour.  There were none of Rhoda's personal belongings.  The animals
were in good condition, however, and the men annexed them to their
outfit gladly.

John was torn betwixt hope and bitter disappointment.

"Do you think they could climb out of the fissure?" he asked half a
dozen times, then without waiting for an answer, "Did you see her face,
Billy?  I had just a glimpse!  Didn't she look well!  Just that one
glance has put new life in me!  I know we will get her!  Even this
cursed desert isn't wide enough to keep me from her!  God help that
Indian when I get him!"

Porter kept his eyes on Alchise's rifle which had never wavered in the
past three hours.

"I've a notion to shoot the barrel off that thing just for luck!" he
growled.  "John, sit down!  You will need all the strength you've got
and then some before you catch that Injun!"

"What are you going to do?" asked John, seating himself in the sand
some few feet from the fissure.

"The big probability is," said Billy, "that they are in the crack.  It
would be just about impossible for a girl to climb out of one of 'em.
If they have got out, though, it's just a matter of finding their trail
again.  We'll have 'em!  It's just this chance crack that saved 'em.
If you're rested, ride along the west wall and try for the top again."

For the next five hours, Porter guarded the mesa front alone.  It was
nearing six o'clock when Jack returned, exhausted and disappointed.  He
had followed the great split back until the mesa top became so cut and
striated with mighty fissures that progress was impossible.

"Isn't it the devil's own luck," he growled to Porter as he ate, "that
we should have let him get into that one crack!  What next!  Unless
they are still in there, we've lost them and are just losing time
squatting here."

As he spoke, there was a sound of voices in the fissure.  The two men
cocked their rifles as John and Carlos emerged from the opening.  John
was scowling and breathless.

"Lost 'em as usual, by our infernal stupidity," he panted, while Carlos
dropped his empty canteen and lifted Porter's to his lips.  "I rode
round to the south of the mesa.  There are a couple of possible ascents
there.  I found Carlos making one.  We followed a dozen fissures before
we located this one.  We got into it about a mile back from here.
Here's a basket we found at the bottom in a burlap bag."

He tossed one of Cesca's pitch baskets at Billy, then threw himself in
the sand.

"They were down off the mesa, I bet," he went on, "before we fools
found the way up, and it was easy for the chap they left guarding the
entrance to avoid us.  The mesa is covered with big rocks."

"He got away within the last half-hour then," said Billy, "for I didn't
stir from this spot until the burro started to eat the grub pack, and I
naturally had to wrestle with him.  And no human being could a got out
the front even then."

"God!  What a country!" groaned DeWitt.  "The Indians outwit us at
every step!"

"Well," Jack answered dejectedly, "tell us what we could have done
differently."

"I'm not blaming any one," replied John.

Billy Porter rose briskly.

"You boys quit your kicking.  The scent is still warm.  You fellows get
a couple of hours' sleep while I take the horses back to Coyote Hole
for water.  By daylight we got to be on the south side of the mesa to
pick up the trail."

Billy's businesslike manner heartened Jack and John DeWitt.  They
turned in beside Carlos, who already was sleeping.

Dawn found them examining the ascents on the south side of the mesa but
they found no traces and as the sun came well up they followed the only
possible way toward the mountains.  At noon they found a low spring in
a pocket between mesa and mountain.  Kut-le was growing either defiant
or careless, for he had left a heap of ashes and a pile of half-eaten
desert mice.  Very much cheered they allowed the horses a fair rest.
They found no further traces of camp or trail that day and made camp
that night in the open desert.

At dawn they were crossing a heavily wooded mountain.  The sun had not
yet risen when they heard a sound of singing.

"What's that?" asked DeWitt sharply, as the four pulled up their horses.

"A medicine cry," answered Jack.  "We must be near some medicine-man's
_campos_."

"Come on," cried DeWitt, "we'll quiz them!"

"Hold up, you chump!" exclaimed Billy.  "If you rush in on a cry that
way you are apt not to come back again.  You've got to go at 'em
careful.  Let me do the talking."

They rode toward the sound of the chant and shortly a dingy _campos_
came into view.  An Indian buck made his way from the doorway toward
them.

"Who is sick, friend?" asked Billy.

"Old buck," said the Indian.

"Apache?" said Billy.

The Indian nodded.

"You _sabe_ Apache named Kut-le?"

The buck shook his head, but Billy went on patiently.

"Yes, you _sabe_ him.  He old Ke-say's son.  Apache chief's son.  He
run off with white squaw.  We want squaw, we no hurt him.  Squaw sick,
no good for Injun.  You tell, have money."  Billy displayed a silver
dollar.

The Indian brightened.

"Long time 'go, some Injun say he _sabe_ Kut-le.  Some Injun say he all
same white man.  Some Injun say he heap smart."  He looked at Billy
inquiringly, and Billy nodded approval.  DeWitt swallowed nervously.
"Come two, three day 'go," the buck went on, his eyes on the silver
dollar, "big Injun, carry white squaw, go by here very fast.  He go
that way all heap fast."  The buck pointed south.

"Did he speak to you?  What did he say?" cried DeWitt.

But the Indian lapsed into silence and refused to speak more.  Porter
felt well rewarded for his efforts and tossed the dollar to the Indian.

"Gee!" said Billy, as they started elated down the mountain.  "I wish
we could overtake him before he outfits again.  That poverty-stricken
lot couldn't have had any horses here for him to use.  I'll bet he
makes for the nearest ranch where he could steal a good bunch.  That
would be at Kelly's, sixty miles south of here.  We'll hike for
Kelly's!"

This idea did not meet with enthusiastic approval from the other three
but as no one had a better suggestion to make, the trail to Kelly's was
taken.  It seemed to John Dewitt that Billy relied little on science
and much on intuition in trailing the Indians.  At first, considering
Porter's early boasts about his skill, DeWitt was much disappointed by
the old-timer's haphazard methods.  But after a few weeks' testing of
the terrible hardships of the desert, after a few demonstrations of the
Apache's cleverness, John had concluded that intuition was the most
reliable weapon that the whites could hope to discover with which to
offset the Indian's appalling skill and knowledge.

It was an exhausted quartet with its string of horses that drew up at
Kelly's dusty corral.  Dick Kelly, a stocky Irishman, greeted the
strangers pleasantly.  When, however, he learned their names he rose to
the occasion as only an Irishman can.

"You gentlemen are at the end of your rope, wid the end frayed at
that!" he said.  "Now come in for a few hours' rest and the Chinaman
will cook you the best meal he knows how."

"Lord, no!" cried Billy.  "We're so close on the track now that we can
hang on to the end.  If you've had no trace here we'll just double back
and start from the mountains again!"

By this time a dozen cowboys and ranch hands were gathered about the
newcomers.  Every one knew about Rhoda's disappearance.  Every one knew
about every man in the little search party.  In the flicker of the
lanterns the men looked pityingly at DeWitt's haggard face.

"Say," said a tall, lank cowman, "if you'll go in and sleep till
daylight, usn'll scour this part of the desert with a fine-tooth comb.
So you all won't lose a minute by taking a little rest.  An' if we find
the Injun we'll string him up and save you the trouble."

DeWitt spoke for the first time.

"If you find the Indian," he said succinctly, "he's mine!"

There was a moment's silence in the crowd.  These men were familiar
with elemental passion.  DeWitt's feeling was perfectly correct in
their eyes.  The pause came as each pictured himself in DeWitt's place
with the image of the delicate Eastern girl suffering who knew what
torments constantly before him.

"If Mr. Kelly can arrange for that," said Jack, "I guess it will about
save our lives.  I'd like a chance to write a letter to my wife."

"You ought to go back to the ditch, Jack," said DeWitt, "Porter and I
will manage somehow."

Jack gave DeWitt a strange look.

"Rhoda's a lifelong friend of mine.  She was stolen from my home by my
friend whom I told her she could trust.  Katherine and the foreman can
run the ranch."

By the time that the four had washed themselves, Kelly had his men
dotted over the surrounding desert.  For the first time in weeks, the
searchers sat down at a table.  DeWitt, Porter and Newman were in
astonishing contrast to the three who had dined at the Newman ranch the
night of Cartwell's introduction to Porter.  Their khaki clothes had
gradually been replaced by nondescript garments picked up at various
ranches.  DeWitt and Porter boasted of corduroy trousers, while Jack
wore overalls.  On the other hand, Jack wore a good blue flannel shirt,
while the other two displayed only faded gingham garments that might
have answered to almost any name.  All of them were a deep mahogany
color, with chapped, split lips and bleached hair, while DeWitt's eyes
were badly inflamed from sun-glare and sand-storm.

They ate silently.  Dick Kelly, sitting at the head of the table, plied
them with food and asked few questions.  DeWitt's shaking hands told
him that questions were torture to the poor fellow.  After the meal
Kelly led them to bed at once, and they slept without stirring until
four o'clock in the morning, when the Chinaman called them.  Breakfast
was steaming on the table.

"Now," said Kelly, as his guests ate, "the boys didn't get a smell for
ye, but we've a suggestion.  Have you been through the Pueblo country
yet?"

"No," said Porter.

"Well," the host went on, "Chira is the only place round here except my
ranch where he could get a new outfit.  He's part Pueblo, you know,
too.  I'd start for there if I was you."

Carlos entered to hear this suggestion.

"I've got a friend at Chira," he said, "who might help us.  He's a
half-breed."

The tired men took eagerly to this forlorn hope.  With all the
population of the ranch, including the cook, gathered to wish them
Godspeed, the four started off before the sun had more than tinted the
east.  Kelly had offered them anything on the ranch, from himself, his
cook and his cowboys, to the choice of his horses.  His guests left as
much heartened by his cheerfulness and good will as they were by the
actual physical comforts he had given them.

The trail to Chira was long and hard.  They reached the little town at
dusk and Carlos set out at once in search of his friend, Philip.  He
found him easily.  He was half Mexican, half Pueblo.  He and Carlos
chatted briskly in hybrid Spanish while the Americans watched the
horses wade in the little river.  Visitors were so common in Chira that
the newcomers attracted little or no attention.

Carlos finally turned from his friend.

"Philip does not know anything about it.  He says for us to come to his
house while he finds out anything.  His wife is a good cook."

The thought of a hot meal was pleasant to the Americans.  They followed
gladly to Philip's adobe rooms.  Here the half-breed left them to his
wife and disappeared.  He was gone perhaps an hour when he returned
with a bit of cloth in his hand, which he handed to Carlos with a few
rapid sentences.  Carlos gave the scrap of cloth to DeWitt, who looked
at it eagerly then gave a cry of joy.  It was Rhoda's handkerchief.

"He found a little girl washing her doll with it at the river," said
Carlos.  "She said she found it blowing along the street this morning."

"Come on!" cried Jack, making for the door.

"Come on where?" said Billy.  "If they are in the village, you don't
want to get away very far.  And if they ain't, which way are you going?"

"Ask Philip where to go, Carlos," said DeWitt.

He held the little moist handkerchief in his hand tightly while his
heart beat heavily.  Once more hope was soaring high.

Philip thought deeply, then he and Carlos talked rapidly together.

"Philip says," reported Carlos, "that you must go out and watch along
the river front so that if they have not gone you can catch them if
they try.  He and I will go visit every family as if I wanted to buy an
outfit."

Darkness had settled on the little town when the three Americans took
up their vigil opposite the open face of the Pueblo along the river.
All that night they stood on guard but not a human being crossed their
line of patrol.

CHAPTER XIII

AN INTERLUDE

Late in the afternoon, Rhoda woke.  Kut-le stood beside her.  His
expression was half eager, half tender.

"How do you feel now?" he asked.

"Quite well," answered Rhoda.  "Will you call Marie?  I want to dress."

"You must rest in bed today," replied the Indian.  "Tomorrow will be
soon enough for you to get up."

Rhoda looked at the young man with irritation.

"Can't you learn that I am not a squaw?  That it maddens me to be
ordered about?  That every time you do you alienate me more, if
possible?"

"You do foolish stunts," said Kut-le calmly, "and I have to put you
right."

Rhoda moaned.

"Oh, how long, how long must I endure this!  How could they be so
stupid as to let you slip through their fingers so!"

Kut-le's mouth became a narrow seam.

"As soon as I can get you into the Sierra Madre, I shall marry you.
You are practically a well woman now.  But I am not going to hurry
overmuch.  You are going to love me first and you are going to love
this life first.  Then we will go to Paris until the storm has passed."

Rhoda did not seem to hear him.  She tossed her arms restlessly.

"Please send Marie to me," she said finally.  "You will permit me to
eat something perhaps?"

Kut-le left the room at once.  In a short time he returned with Marie,
who bore a steaming bowl which he himself flanked with a dish of
luscious melon.  The woman propped Rhoda adroitly to a sitting position
and Kut-le gravely balanced the bowl against the girl's knees.  The
stew which the bowl contained was delicious, and Rhoda ate it to the
last drop.  She ate in silence, while Kut-le watched her with
unspeakable longing in his eyes.  The room was almost dark when the
simple meal was finished.  Marie brightened the fire and smoothed
Rhoda's blankets.

"Kut-le go now," said the Pueblo woman.  "You rest.  In morning, Marie
bring white squaw some clothes."

Rhoda was glad to pillow her head on her arm but it was long before she
slept.  She tried to piece together her faint and distorted
recollection of the occurrences since the morning when the mesa had
risen through the dawn.  But her only clear picture was of John
DeWitt's wild face as she disappeared into the fissure.  She recalled
its look of agony and sobbed a little to herself as she realized what
torture he and the Newmans must have endured since her disappearance.
And yet she was very hopeful.  If her friends could come as close to
her as they did before the mesa, they must be learning Kut-le's
methods.  Surely the next time luck would not play so well for the
Indian.

Rhoda woke in the morning to the sound of song.  Marie knelt on the
ground before a sloping slab of stone and patiently kneeded corn with a
smaller stone.  Her song, a quaint repetition of short mellow syllables
pleased Rhoda's sensitive ear and she lay listening.  When Marie saw
Rhoda's wide eyes she came to the girl's side.

"You feel good now?" she queried.

"Yes, much better.  I want to get up."

The Indian woman nodded.

"Marie clean white squaw's clothes.  White squaw wear Marie's.  Now
Marie help you wash."

Rhoda smiled.

"You are not an Apache if you want me to bathe!"

Marie answered indignantly.

"Marie is Pueblo squaw!"

The clothes that Marie brought, Rhoda thought very attractive.  There
was a soft wool underdress of creamiest tint.  Over this Marie pulled,
fastening it at one shoulder, a gay, many-colored overdress which, like
the one she herself wore, reached to the knees.  Rhoda pulled on her
own high laced boots which had been neatly mended.  Then the two turned
their attention to the neglected braid of hair.

When it was loosened and hung in tangled masses nearly to Rhoda's
knees, Marie's delight in its loveliness knew no expression.  She
fetched a queer battered old comb which she washed and then proceeded
with true feminine rapture to comb the wonderful waving locks.  In the
midst of this Kut-le entered.  He gazed on Rhoda's new disguise with
delight.  Indeed her delicate face, above the many-hued garment, was
like a harebell growing in a gaudy nasturtium bed.

"We can only let you on the roof," said Kut-le, who was carrying
Rhoda's sombrero.

Rhoda made no reply but when Marie had plaited her hair in a rippling
braid she followed Kut-le up the short ladder.  Her sense of
cleanliness after the weeks of disorder was delightful.  As she stepped
on the flat-topped roof and the sweet clear air filled her lungs she
felt as if reborn.  With Navajo blankets, Kut-le had contrived an
awning that not only made a bit of shade but precluded view from below.
The rich tints of the blankets were startlingly picturesque against the
yellow gray of the adobe.  Rhoda, dropped luxuriantly to the heap of
blankets and turned her face toward the mountain, many-colored and bare
toward the base, deep-cloaked with piñon, oak and Juniper on the
uplands.  From its base flowed the little river, gurgling over its
shallow bed of stone and rich with green along its flat banks.  Close
beside the river was the Pueblo village, the many-terraced buildings,
on one of the roofs of which Rhoda sat.

Kut-le, stretched on the roof near by, smoked cigarette after cigarette
as he watched the girl's quiet face, but he did not speak.  For three
or four hours the two sat thus in silence.  Just as the sun sank behind
the mountain, a bell clanged and then fell to tolling softly.  Then
Kut-le broke his silence.

"That's the bell of the old mission.  Some one has been buried, I
guess.  We can look.  There are no tourists now."

There was a sound of wailing: a deep mournful sound that caught Rhoda's
heart to her throat and blanched her face.  It was the sound of the
grief of primitive man, the cry of the forlorn and broken-hearted,
uncloaked by convention.  It touched a primitive chord of response in
Rhoda that set her to trembling.  Surely, when the world was young she
too had wept so.  Surely she too had voiced a poignant, unbearable loss
in just such a wild outpouring of grief!

They moved to the edge of the terrace and looked below into the street.
Down the rocky way a line of Indians was bearing hand-mills and jars
and armloads of ornaments.

"They will take those to the 'killing place' and break them that the
dead owner may have them afterward," explained Kut-le softly.  "It
always makes me think of a verse in the Bible.  I can't recall the
words exactly though."

Rhoda glanced up into the dark face with a look of appreciation.

"'And the grinders shall cease because they are few!'" she said, "'and
those that look out of the windows be darkened.  And the doors shall be
shut in the street when the sound of the grinding is low, because man
goeth to his long home and mourners go about the street.'"

"And there is something else," murmured Kut-le, "about 'the silver
cord.'"

"'Or ever the silver cord be loosed or the golden bowl be broken or the
pitcher be broken at the fountain or the wheel broken at the cistern.
Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was and the spirit to God
who gave it.'"

They stood in silence again.  The wailing died into the distance.  The
sun touched to molten gold the heavy shadows of the mountain arroyos.
Rhoda was deeply moved by the scene below her.  She felt as if she had
been thrust back through the ages to look upon the sorrow of some
little Judean town.  The little rocky street, the vivid robes, the
weird, dying wail, the broken ornaments and utensils that some folded
tired hands would use no more, and, above all, the simple unquestioning
faith, roused in her a sudden longing for a life that she never had
known.  For a long time she stood in thought.  As darkness fell she
roused herself.

"Let me go back to my room," she said.

As they turned, neither noticed that Rhoda's little handkerchief, which
she had carried through all her experiences, fluttered from her sleeve
to the street.

Again it was long before Rhoda slept.  Through her window there floated
the sound of song, the evening singing of Indian lads in the village
street.  There was a vibrant quality in their voices that Rhoda could
liken only to the music of stringed instruments.  There was neither the
mellow smoothness of the negro voice nor the flute-like sweetness of
the white, yet the voices compassed all the mystical appealing quality
of violin notes.

The music woke in Rhoda a longing for she knew not what.  It seemed to
her as if she were peering past a misty veil into the childhood of the
world to whose simple beauty and delights civilization had made her
alien.  The vibrating voices chanted slower and slower.  Rhoda stirred
uneasily.  To be free again as these voices were free!  Not to long for
the civilization she had left but for open skies and trails!  To be
free again!

As the voices melted into silence, a guitar was touched softly under
Rhoda's window and Kut-le's voice rose in _La Golondrina_:

  "Whither so swiftly flies the timid swallow?
  What distant bourne seeks her untiring wing?
  To reach her nest what needle does she follow
  When darkness wraps the poor wee storm-tossed thing?"

Rhoda stirred restlessly and threw her arms above her head.

  "To build her nest near to my couch I'll call her!
  Why go so far dark and strange skies to seek?
  Safe would she be, no evil should befall her,
  For I'm an exile sad, too sad to weep!"

Mist-like floated across Rhoda's mind a memory of the trail with voice
of mating bird at dawn, with stars and the night wind and the open way.
And going before, always Kut-le--Kut-le of the unfathomable eyes, of
the merry smile, of the gentle touch.  The music merged itself into
Rhoda's dreams.

She spent the following day on the roof.  Curled on her Navajo she
watched the changing tones on the mountains and listened to the soft
voices of the Pueblo women in the street below.  Naked brown babies
climbed up and down the ladders and paddled in the shallow river Indian
women with scarlet shawls across their shoulders filled their ollas at
the river and stood gossiping, the brimming ollas on their heads.  In
the early morning the men had trudged to the alfalfa and melon fields
and returned at sundown to be greeted joyfully by the women and
children.

Kut-le spent the day at Rhoda's side.  They talked but little, though
Rhoda had definitely abandoned her rule of silence toward the Indian.
Her mind during most of the day was absorbed in wondering why she so
enjoyed watching the life in this Indian town and why she was not more
impatient to be gone.

As the sun dropped behind the mountain Marie appeared on the roof, her
black eyes very bright.

"Half-breed Philip find white squaw's handkerchief.  Give to white men,
maybe!  Marie see Philip get handkerchief from little girl."

Kut-le gave Rhoda an inscrutable look, but she did not tell him that
she shared his surprise.

"Well," said Kut-le calmly, "maybe we had better mosey along."

They descended to find Marie hastily doing up a bundle of bread and
fruit.  While Kut-le went for blankets Rhoda, at Marie's request,
donned her old clothing of the trail.  She had been wearing the squaw's
holiday outfit.  Very shortly, with a hasty farewell to Marie, they
were in the dusky street.  "Shall I gag you," asked Kut-le, "or will
you give me your word of honor to give neither sign nor sound until we
get to the mountain, and to keep your face covered with your Navajo?"

Rhoda sighed.

"Very well, I promise," she said.

In a very short time they had reached the end of the little street and
were climbing an arroyo up into the mountain.  When they reached the
piñons Kut-le gave the coyote call.  It thrilled Rhoda with the misery
of the night of her capture.  Almost immediately there was an answering
call and close in the shadow of the piñon they found Alchise and the
two squaws.  Molly ran to Rhoda with a squeal of joy and patted the
girl's hand but Alchise and Cesca gave no heed to her greeting.

The ponies were ready and Rhoda swung herself to her saddle, with a
thrill at the touch of the muscular little horse.  And once more she
rode after Kut-le with the mystery of the night trail before her.

The sound of water falling, the cheep of wakening birds, the subtle
odor of moisture-drenched soil roused Rhoda from her half sleep on the
horse's back at the end of the night's journey.  The trail had not been
hard, through an endless pine forest for the most part.  Kut-le drew
rein beside a little waterfall deep in the mountain fastness.  Rhoda
saw a chaos of rock masses huge and distorted, as if an inconceivably
cruel and gigantic hand had juggled with weights seemingly immovable;
about these the loveliness of vine and shrub; above them the towering
junipers dwarfed by the rocks they shaded; and falling softly over the
harsh brown rifts of rock, the liquid green and white of a mountain
brook which, as it reached the level, rushed away in a roar of foam.

Rhoda's horse drank thirstily and she stood beside him watching the
mystical gray of the dawn lift to the riotous rose of the sunrise.  She
wondered at the quick throb of her pulse.  It was very different from
its wonted soft beat.  Then she threw herself on her blanket to sleep.

When Rhoda woke, late in the day, Kut-le had spread Marie's cakes and
fruit on leaves which he had washed in the brook.

"They are quite clean, I think," he said a little anxiously.  "At least
the squaws haven't touched them."

Rhoda and Kut-le sat on a rock and ate hungrily.  When she had finished
Rhoda clasped her hands about her knees.  She looked singularly boyish,
with her sombrero pushed back from her face and short locks of damp
hair curling from beneath the crown.

"Isn't it queer," she said, "that you elude Jack and John DeWitt so
easily?"

"The trouble is," said Kut-le, "that you don't appreciate the prowess
of your captors."

"Humph!" sniffed Rhoda.

"Listen!" cried Kut-le with sudden enthusiasm.  "Once in my boyhood
Geronima and about twenty warriors, with twice as many squaws and
children, fled to the mountains.  They never drew rein until they were
one hundred and twenty miles from the reservation.  Then for six months
they were pursued by two thousand American soldiers and they never lost
a man!"

"How many whites were killed?" asked Rhoda.

"About a hundred!"

"I don't understand yet," Rhoda shook her head, "how savages could
outwit whites for so long a time."

"But it's not a contest of brains.  Whites must travel like whites,
with food and rests.  The Apache travels like the coyote, living off
the country.  Your ancestors have been training your brain for a
thousand years.  Mine have spent centuries of days, twenty-four hours a
day, training the body to endure hardships.  You have had a glimpse of
what the hardships of this country might mean to a white!"

As Kut-le talked, Rhoda sat with her eyes fastened on the rough face of
a distant rock.  As she watched she saw a thick, leafy bush move up to
the rock.  Rhoda caught her breath, glanced at the unconscious Kut-le,
then back at the bush.  It moved slowly back among the trees and after
a moment Rhoda saw the undergrowth far beyond move as with a passing
breeze.  She glanced at the nodding Alchise and the squaws, then smiled
and turned to Kut-le.

"Go on with your boasting, Kut-le.  It's your one weakness, I think."

Kut-le grinned.

"Well now, honestly, what do you think that a lot of Caucasians can do
with an enemy whose existence has always been a fist to fist fight with
nature at her cruelest?  We have fought with our bare hands and we have
won," he continued, half to himself.  "No white man or any number of
whites can capture me on my own ground!"

"Boaster!" laughed Rhoda.

Just beyond the falls an aspen quivered.  John DeWitt stepped into
view.  Haggard and wild-eyed, he stared at Rhoda.  She raised her
finger to her lips, but too late.  Kut-le too looked up, and raised his
gun.  Rhoda hurled herself toward him and struck up the barrel.  Kut-le
dropped the gun and caught Rhoda in his arms.

"The woods are full of them!" he grunted.  With one hand across Rhoda's
mouth, he ran around the falls and dropped six feet to a narrow back
trail.

"My own ground!" Rhoda heard him chuckle.

CHAPTER XIV

THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD

For many hurrying minutes, Rhoda saw only the passing tree branches
black against the evening sky as she lay across Kut-le's breast.  The
pursuers had made no sound nor had Kut-le broken a single twig.  The
entire incident might have been a pantomime, with every actor
tragically intent.

Having long learned the futility of struggling, Rhoda lay quietly
enough, her ears keen to catch the sound of pursuit.  Kut-le did not
remove his hand from her mouth.  But as he dropped rapidly and
skilfully down the mountainside he whispered:

"My own ground, you see!  It will take them a good while in the dusk to
find that back trail.  Only a few Indians know it."

But Rhoda's heart was beating high.  Let Kut-le boast as he would, she
was sure that Jack and John DeWitt were learning to follow the trail.
The most vivid picture in her mind was of the utter weariness of John's
face.  In the past weeks Rhoda had learned how fearful had been the
hardships that would bring such weariness to a human face.  Tears came
to her eyes.  No one so weak, so useless as herself, she felt, could be
worth such travail.

Silently they moved through the dusk.  Rhoda knew that the other
Indians must be close behind them, yet no sound betrayed their
presence.  After a half-hour or so she struggled to be set down.  But
Kut-le only tightened his hold and it was fully two hours later that he
set her on her feet.

"Don't move," he said.  "We are on a cañon edge."

Rhoda swung her blanket to her shoulders, for the night was stinging
sharp.  She was not afraid.  She had grown so accustomed to the night
trail that she moved unhesitatingly along black rims that had at first
paralyzed her with fear.

"Now," said Kut-le, "I'm not going to travel on foot.  The only horses
within easy distance are some that a bunch of Navajos have in the cañon
below here.  So we will go down and get them.  We will go together
because I can't risk coming back for you.  We will have to hike
_pronto_ after we get 'em.  Just remember that you are contaminated by
the company you are keeping and that if you make any noise, the Navajos
will shoot you up, with the rest of us!  Keep right behind me."

The little group moved carefully down the cañon trail.  In a short time
they reached a growth of trees.  They stole through these, the only
sound Rhoda's panting breaths.  Suddenly Kut-le stopped.

"Wait here!" he breathed in Rhoda's ear, and he and Alchise disappeared.

A hand was laid on her arm and Rhoda knew that Molly and Cesca were
guarding her.  Almost immediately the soft thud of hoofs was upon them.
Kut-le seized Rhoda and tossed her to a pony's back.

"It was dead easy!" he whispered.  "They were all asleep!  I even took
a saddle for you!  Now hike!"

Rhoda gripped her pony with her knees as the little fellow cantered
unerringly through the darkness after Kut-le.  She felt a sudden pride
and exultation in the security she had developed in the saddle during
the travail of her night rides.  She knew that no man of her
acquaintance could ride a horse as she could now.  And with the
exultation she was trembling with excitement.  She knew that none of
them could expect mercy if the Navajos discovered their loss in time to
take up the chase.  All the eagerness of the gambler who stakes his
life on a throw of the dice; all the wild thrill of the chase; all the
trembling of the panting, woodland things that hunt and are hunted,
were Rhoda's as the night wind rushed past her face.  The apathy of
illness was gone.  Tonight she was as wild a thing as the night's birds
that brushed across their trail on sweeping wing.

When they made camp at dawn Rhoda tumbled into her blanket and was
asleep before Alchise finished covering their trail.  When she woke she
found that they were camped in a strange eerie.  They were high up on a
mountain on a shelf that gave back into a shallow cave.  In front,
facing the desert, was a heap of rock that formed a natural rampart.  A
tiny spring bubbled from the cave floor.  Here the little party would
seem as secure in their dizzy seclusion as eagles of the Andes.

It was barely noon and the mountain air was sweet and exhilarating.
Kut-le sat against the rampart, smoking a cigarette, while Molly and
Cesca worked over the fire.  Rhoda lunched on the tortillas to which
Molly had clung through all the vicissitudes of flight.

"Where are the horses?" she asked Kut-le.

"Oh, Alchise took them back.  We must stay here a while till your mob
of friends disperses.  I couldn't feed them and I wanted to pacify the
Navajos and get some supplies from them.  Alchise will fix it up with
them."

And here on this dizzy brink of the desert Kut-le did pause as if for a
long, long holiday.  The wisdom of the proceeding did not trouble him
at all.  The call of the desert was an allurement to which he yielded
unresistingly, trusting to elude capture through his skill and
unfailing good fortune.

To Rhoda the pause was welcome.  She still had faith that the longer
they camped in one spot the surer would be the pursuers to stumble upon
them.  Kut-le began to devote himself entirely to Rhoda's amusement.
He knew all the plant and animal life of the desert, not only as an
Indian but as a college man who had loved biology.  By degrees Rhoda's
good brain began to respond to his vivid interest and the girl in her
stay on the mountain shelf learned the desert as has been given to few
whites to learn it.  Besides what she learned from the men Rhoda became
expert in camp work under Molly's patient teaching.  She could kindle
the tiny, smokeless fire.  She could concoct appetizing messes from the
crude food.  She could detect good water from bad and could find forage
for horses.  The crowning pride of her achievements was learning to
weave the dish basketry.

They had lived in the mountain niche some three weeks when Alchise and
Kut-le left the camp one afternoon, Alchise on a turkey hunt, Kut-le on
one of his mysterious trips for supplies.  Alchise returned at dusk
with a beautiful bird which Rhoda and Molly roasted with enthusiasm.
But Kut-le did not appear at supper time as he had promised.  When the
meal was almost spoiled from waiting, Rhoda and the Indians ate.  As
the evening wore on, Alchise grew uneasy, but he dared not disobey
Kut-le's orders and leave the camp unguarded at night.

Rhoda speculated, torn between hope and fear.  Perhaps the searchers
had captured Kut-le at last.  Perhaps he had given up hope of winning
her love and had gone for good.  Perhaps, somewhere or other, he was
lying badly hurt!  The little group sat up much later than usual, Cesca
silently smoking her endless cigarettes, Alchise and Molly talking now
in Apache, now in English.  Rhoda was convinced that they were puzzled
and worried.

Even after she had lain down on her blankets Rhoda could not sleep.
With Kut-le gone her sense of the camp's security was gone.  She rose
finally and sat beside Alchise who, rifle in hand, guarded the ledge.
There was no moon but the stars were very large and near.  Rhoda was
growing to know the stars.  They were remote in the East; in the desert
they become a part of one's existence.  The sense of stupendous
distance was greater at night than in the daytime.  The infinite
heavens, stretching depth beyond depth, the faint far spaces of the
desert, were as if one looked on the Great Mystery itself.

When dawn came, Alchise wakened Cesca, put the rifle into her hands,
and hurried back up over the mountain.  The purple shadows had
lightened to gray when Rhoda saw Kut-le staggering up the trail from
the desert.  Rhoda gave a little cry and ran down to meet him.

"Kut-le!  What happened to you?  We were so worried!"

There was a bloody rag tied just below the young Indian's knee.  He
paused, supporting himself against a rock.  Across his eyes, drawn and
haggard with pain, flashed a look of joy that Rhoda, eying the bandage,
did not see.

"I was late starting back," he said briefly.  "In the darkness a bit of
the trail gave way, dropped me into a cañon and laid my leg open.  I
was unconscious a long time and lost a lot of blood, so it has taken me
the rest of the night to get here.  Would you mind getting Alchise to
help me up the trail?"

"Alchise has gone to look for you.  Lean on me," said Rhoda simply.

Despite his weakness, the dark blood flushed the young man's face,
while Rhoda's utter unconsciousness of her changed manner brought a
smile to his set lips.  Not if the torture of dragging himself up the
trail were to be ten times greater would he now have availed himself of
help from Alchise.

"If you will let me put my arm across your shoulder we can make it," he
said as quietly as though his heart were not leaping.

Rhoda's squaring of her slender shoulders was distractingly boyish.
Utterly heedless of the pain which each step cost him, Kut-le made his
way slowly to the ledge, ordering back the flustered squaws and leaning
on Rhoda only enough to feel the tender girlish shoulders beneath the
worn blue blouse.

In the camp, Rhoda assumed command while Kut-le lay on his blanket
watching her in silent content.  She put one of Alchise's two calico
shirts on to boil over the breakfast fire.  She washed out the nasty
cut and bandaged it with strips from the sterilized shirt.  She brought
Kut-le's breakfast and her own to his blanket side and coaxed the young
man to eat, he assuming great indifference merely for the happiness of
being urged.  Rhoda was so energetic and efficient that the sun was
just climbing from behind the far peaks when Kut-le finished his bacon
and coffee.  The girl stood looking at him, hands on hips, head on one
side, with that look in her eyes of superiority, maternity and
complacent tenderness which a woman can assume only when she has
ministered to the needs of a helpless masculine thing.

"There!" she said with a sigh of satisfaction.

"Rhoda," said Kut-le, hoping that the heavy thumping of his heart did
not shake his whole broad chest, "how long ago was it that you were a
helpless, dying little girl without strength to cut up your own food?
How long since you have served any one but yourself?"

Rhoda drew a quick breath.  She stood staring from the Indian to the
desert, to her slender body, and back again.  She held out her hands
and looked at them.  They were scratched and brown and did not tremble.
Then she looked at the young Indian and he never was to forget the
light in her eyes.

"Kut-le!" she cried.  "Kut-le!  I am well again!  I am well again!"

She paced back and forth along the ledge.  Through the creamy tan her
cheeks flushed richly crimson.  Finally she stopped before the Apache.

"You have outraged all my civilized instincts," she said slowly, "yet
you have saved my life and given me health.  Whatever comes, Kut-le, I
never shall forget that!"

"I have changed more than that," said Kut-le quietly.  "Where is your
old hatred of the desert?"

Rhoda turned to look.  At the edge of the distant ranges showed a rim
of red.  Crimson spokes of fire flashed to the zenith.  The sky grew
brighter, more translucent, the ranges melted into molten gold.  The
sun, hot and scarlet, rolled into view.  Into Rhoda's heart flooded a
sense of infinite splendor, infinite beauty, infinite peace.

"Why!" she gasped to Kut-le, "it is beautiful!  It's not terrible!
It's unadorned beauty!"

The Indian nodded but did not speak.  Rhoda never was to forget that
day.  Long years after she was to catch the afterglow of that day of
her rebirth.  Suddenly she realized that never could a human have found
health in a setting more marvelous.  The realization was almost too
much.  Kut-le, with sympathy for which she was grateful, did not talk
to her much.  Once, however, as she brought him a drink and
mechanically smoothed his blanket he said softly:

"You who have been served and demanded service all your life, why do
you do this?"

Rhoda answered slowly.

"I'm not serving you.  I'm trying to pay up some of the debt of my
life."

Kut-le was about in a day or so and by the end of the week he was quite
himself.  He resumed the daily expeditions with Rhoda and Alchise which
provided text for the girl's desert learning.  Rhoda's old despondency,
her old agony of prayer for immediate rescue had given way to a strange
conflict of desires.  She was eager for rescue, was conscious of a
constant aching desire for her own people, and yet the old sense of
outrage, of grief, of hopelessness was gone.

Of a sudden she found herself pausing, thrusting back the problems that
confronted her while she drank to the full this strange mad joy of life
which she felt must leave her when she left the desert.  She knew only
that the fear of death was gone.  That hours of fever and pain were no
more.  That her mind had found its old poise but with an utterly new
view-point of life.  Her blood ran red.  Her lungs breathed deep.  Her
eyes saw distances too big for their conception, beauties so deep that
her spirit had to expand to absorb them.

The silent nights of stars, the laborious crests that tossed sudden and
unspeakable views before the eyes, the eternal cañons that led beneath
ranges of surpassing majesty, roused in her a passion of delight that
could find expression only in her growing physical prowess.  She lived
and ate like a splendid boy.  Day after day she scaled the ranges with
Kut-le and Alchise; tenderly reared creature of an ultracivilization as
she was, she learned the intricate lore of the aborigines, learned what
students of the dying people would give their hearts to know.

Kut-le wakened Rhoda at dawn one day.  She prepared the breakfast of
coffee, bacon and tortilla.  Alchise shared this eagerly with Rhoda and
Kut-le, though already he had eaten with the squaws.  The day was still
gray when the three set out on a long day's trip in search of game.
The way this morning led up a cañon deep and quiet, with the night
shadows still dark and cool within it.  The air was that of a northern
day of June.

Rhoda tramped bravely, up and up, from cactus to bear grass, from bear
grass to stunted cedar, from cedar to pines that at last rose
triumphant at the crest of a great ridge.  Here Rhoda and Kut-le flung
themselves to the ground to rest while Alchise prowled about
restlessly.  Across a hundred miles of desert rose faint snow-capped
peaks.

Kut-le watched Rhoda's rapt face for a time.  Then, as if unable to
keep back the words, he said softly:

"Rhoda!  Stay here, always!  Marry me and stay here always!"

Rhoda looked at the beautiful pleading eyes.  She stirred restlessly;
but before she could frame an answer Alchise appeared, followed by a
lean old Indian all but toothless who wore a pair of tattered overalls
and a gauze shirt.  The two Indians stopped before Kut-le, and Alchise
jerked a thumb at the stranger.

"_Sabe_ no white talk," he said.

Kut-le passed the stranger a cigarette, which he accepted without
comment.  A rapid conversation followed between the three Indians.

"He is an Apache," explained Kut-le, finally, to Rhoda.  "His name is
Injun Tom.  He says that Newman and Porter hired him to trail us but he
is tired of the job.  They foolishly advanced him five dollars.  He
says they are camping in the valley right below here."

Rhoda sprang to her feet.

"Where are you going?" smiled Kut-le.  "He says they are going to shoot
me on sight!"

Under her tan Rhoda's face whitened.

"Would they shoot you, Kut-le, even if I told them not to?"

At the sight of the paling face the young man murmured, "You dear!"
under his breath.  Then aloud, "Not if I were your husband."

"How can I marry a savage?" cried Rhoda.

Kut-le put his hand under the cleft chin and lifted the sweet face till
it looked directly into his.  His gaze was very deep and clear.

"Am I nothing but a naked savage, Rhoda?" he said.  "Am I?"

Rhoda's eyes did not leave his.

"No!" she said softly, under her breath.

Kut-le's eyes deepened.  He turned and picked up his rifle.

"Bring your friend back to dinner, Alchise," he said.  "Our little
holiday must end right here."

They reached the camp at noon and while the squaws made ready for
breaking camp, Rhoda sat deep in thought.  Before her were the burning
sky and desert, with hawk and buzzard circling in the clear blue.
Where had the old hatred of Kut-le gone?  Whence came this new trust
and understanding, this thrill at his touch?  Kut-le, who had been
watching her adoringly, rose and came to her side.  The rampart hid the
two from the others.  Kut-le took one of Rhoda's hands in his firm
fingers and laid his lips against her palm.  Rhoda flushed and drew her
hand away.  But Kut-le again put his hand beneath her cleft chin and
lifted her face to his.

Just as the brown face all but touched hers a voice sounded from behind
the rampart:

"Hello, you!  Where's Kut-le?"

CHAPTER XV

AN ESCAPE

Rhoda sprang away from Kut-le and they both ran to the other side of
the rampart.  Billy Porter, worn and tattered but still looking very
well able to hold his own, stood staring into the cave where the squaws
eyed him open-mouthed and Alchise, his hand on his rifle, scowled at
him aggressively.  Porter's eye fell on Injun Tom.

"U-huh!  You pison Piute, you!  I just nacherally snagged your little
game, didn't I?"

"Billy!" cried Rhoda.  "O Billy Porter!"

Porter jumped as if at a blow.  Rhoda stood against the rock in her
boyish clothes, her beautiful braid sweeping her shoulder, her face
vivid.

"My God!  Miss Rhoda!" cried Billy hoarsely, as he ran toward her with
outstretched hands.  "Why, you are well!  What's happened to you!"

Here Kut-le stepped between the two.

"Hello, Mr. Porter," he said.

Billy stepped back and a look of loathing and anger took the place of
the joy that had been in his eyes before.

"You Apache devil!" he growled.  "You ain't as smart as you thought you
were!"

Rhoda ran forward and would have taken Porter's hand but Kut-le
restrained her with his hand on her shoulder.

"Where did you come from, Billy?" cried Rhoda.  "Where are the others?"

Billy's face cleared a little at the sound of the girl's voice.

"They are right handy, Miss Rhoda."

"I'll give you a few details, Rhoda," said Kut-le coolly.  "You see he
is without water and his mouth is black with thirst.  He started to
trail Injun Tom but got lost and stumbled on us."

Rhoda gave a little cry of pity and running into the cave she brought
Billy a brimming cup of water.

"Is that true, Billy?" she asked.  "Are the others near here?"

Billy nodded then drained the cup and held it out for more.

"They are just around the corner!" with a glance at Kut-le, who smiled
skeptically.

"Oh!" exclaimed Rhoda.  "What terrible trouble I have made you all!"

"You made!" said Porter.  "Well that's good!  Still, that Apache devil
doesn't seem to have harmed you.  Just the same, he'll get his!  If I
shot him now, the other Injuns would get me and God knows what would
happen to you!"

"Whom do you call an Apache devil?" asked Kut-le.  Rhoda never had seen
him show such evident anger.

"You, by Judas!" replied Porter, looking into the young Indian's face.

For a strained moment the two eyed each other, hatred glaring at
hatred, until Rhoda put a hand on Kut-le's arm.  His face cleared at
once.

"So that's my reputation now, is it?" he said lightly.

"_That's_ your reputation!" sneered Billy.  "Do you think that's _all_?
Why, don't you realize that you can't live in your own country again?
Don't you know that the whites will hunt you out like you was a rat?
Don't you realize that the folks that believed in you and was fond of
you has had to give up their faith in you?  Don't you understand that
you've lost all your white friends?  But I suppose that don't mean
anything to an Injun!"

A look of sadness passed over Kut-le's face.

"Porter," he said very gently, "I counted on all of that before I did
this thing.  I thought that the sacrifice was worth while, and I still
think so.  I'm sorry, for your sake, that you stumbled on us here.  We
are going to start on the trail shortly and I must send you out to be
lost again.  I'll let Alchise help you in the job.  As you say, I have
sacrificed everything else in life; I can't afford to let anything
spoil this now.  You can rest for an hour.  Eat and drink and fill your
canteen.  Take a good pack of meat and tortillas.  You are welcome to
it all."

The Indian spoke with such dignity, with such tragic sincerity, that
Porter gave him a look of surprise and Rhoda felt hot tears in her
eyes.  Kut-le turned to the girl.

"You can see that I can't let you talk alone with Porter, but go ahead
and say anything you want to in my hearing.  Molly, you bring the white
man some dinner and fix him some trail grub.  Hurry up, now!"

He seated himself on the rampart and lighted a cigarette.  Porter sat
down meditatively, with his back against the mountain wall.  He was
discomfited.  Kut-le had guessed correctly as to the circumstances of
his finding the camp.  He had no idea where his friends might have gone
in the twenty-four hours since he had left them.  When he stumbled on
to Kut-le he had had a sudden hope that the Indian might take him
captive.  The Indian's quiet reception of him nonplussed him and roused
his unwilling admiration.

Rhoda sat down beside Porter.

"How is John?" she asked.

"He is pretty good.  He has lasted better than I thought he would."

"And Katherine and Jack?"  Rhoda's voice trembled as she uttered the
names.  It was only with the utmost difficulty that she spoke
coherently.  All her nerves were on the alert for some unexpected
action on the part of either Billy or the Indians.

"Jack's all right," said Billy.  "We ain't seen Mrs. Jack since the day
after you was took, but she's all to the good, of course, except she's
been about crazy about you, like the rest of us."

"Oh, you poor, poor people!" moaned Rhoda.

Porter essayed a smile with his cracked lips.

"But, say, you do look elegant, Miss Rhoda.  You ain't the same girl!"

Rhoda blushed through her tan.

"I forgot these," she said; "I've worn them so long."

"It ain't the clothes," said Billy, "and it ain't altogether your fine
health.  It's more--I don't know what it is!  It's like the desert!"

"That's what I tell her," said Kut-le.

"Say," said Billy, scowling, "you've got a nerve, cutting in as if this
was a parlor conversation you had cut in on casual.  Just keep out of
this, will you!"

Rhoda flushed.

"Well, as long as he can hear everything, it's a good deal of a farce
not to let him talk," she said.

"Farce!" exclaimed Billy.  "Say, Miss Rhoda, you ain't sticking up for
this ornery Piute, are you?"

Rhoda looked at the calm eyes of the Indian, at the clean-cut
intelligence of his face, and she resented Porter's words.  She
answered him softly but clearly.

"Kut-le did an awful and unforgivable thing in stealing me.  No one
knows that better than I do.  But he has treated me with respect and he
has given me back my health.  I thank him for that and--and I do
respect him!"

Kut-le's eyes flashed with a deep light but he said nothing.  Porter
stared at the girl with jaw dropped.

"Good Lord!" he cried.  "Respect him!  Wouldn't that come and get you!
Do you mean that you want to stay with that Injun?"

A slow flush covered Rhoda's tanned cheeks.  Her cleft chin lifted a
little.

"At the very first chance," she replied, "I shall escape."

Porter sighed in great relief.

"That's all right, Miss Rhoda," he said leniently.  "Respect him all
you want to.  I don't see how you can, but women is queer, if you don't
mind my saying so.  I don't blame you for feeling thankful about your
health.  You've stood this business better than any of us.  Say, that
squaw seems to be puttin' all her time on making up my pack.  Can't I
negotiate for something to eat right now?  Tell her not to put pison
into it."

Kut-le grinned.

"Maybe Miss Tuttle will fix up something for you, so you can eat
without worrying."

"Well, she won't, you know!" growled Porter.  "_Her_ wait on me!  She
ain't no squaw!"

"Oh, but," cried Rhoda, "you don't know how proud I am of my skill!  I
can run the camp just as well as the squaws."  Then, as Porter scowled
at Kut-le, "He didn't make me!  I wanted to, so as to be able to take
care of myself when I escaped.  When you and I get away from him," she
looked at the silent Indian with an expression of daring that brought a
glint of amusement to his eyes, "I'll be able to live off the trail
better than you!"

"Gee!" exclaimed Porter admiringly.

"Of course, in one way it's no credit to me at all," Rhoda went on,
stirring the rabbit stew she was warming up.  "Kut-le--" she paused.
Of what use was it to try to explain what Kut-le had done for her!

She toasted fresh tortillas and poured the stew over them and brought
the steaming dish to Porter.  He tasted of the mess tentatively.

"By Hen!" he exclaimed, and he set upon the stew as if half starved,
while Rhoda watched him complacently.

Seeing him apparently thus engrossed, Kut-le turned to speak to
Alchise.  Instantly Porter dropped the stew, drew a revolver and fired
two rapid shots, one catching Alchise in the leg, the other Injun Tom.
Before he could get Kut-le the young Indian was upon him.

"Run, Rhoda, run!" yelled Porter, as he went down, under Kut-le.

Rhoda gave one glance at Injun Tom and Alchise writhing with their
wounds, at Porter's fingers tightening at Kut-le's throat, then she
seized the canteen she had filled for Porter and started madly down the
trail.  The screaming squaws gave no heed to her.

She ran swiftly, surely, down the rocky way, watching the trail with
secondary sense, for every other was strained to catch the sounds from
above.  But she heard nothing but the screams of the squaws.  The trail
twisted violently near the desert floor.  She sped about one last
jutting buttress, then stopped abruptly, one hand on her heaving breast.

A man was running toward the foot of the trail.  He, too, stopped
abruptly.  The girl seemed a marvel of beauty to him.  With the curly
hair beneath the drooping sombrero, the tanned, flushed face, the
parted scarlet lips, the throat and tiny triangle of chest disclosed by
the rough blue shirt with one button missing from the top, and the
beautiful lithe legs in the clinging buckskins, Rhoda was a wonderful
thing to come upon unexpectedly.  As John DeWitt took off his hat, his
haggard face went white, his stalwart shoulders heaved.

"O John!  Dear John DeWitt!" cried Rhoda.  "Turn back with me quick!  I
am running away while Mr. Porter holds Kut-le!"

DeWitt held out his shaking hands to her, unbelieving rapture growing
in his eyes.

CHAPTER XVI

ADRIFT IN THE DESERT

Rhoda put her hands into the outstretched, shaking palms.

"Rhoda!  Sweetheart!  Sweetheart!" DeWitt gasped.  Then his voice
failed him.

For an instant Rhoda leaned against his heaving chest.  She felt as if
after long wandering in a dream she suddenly had stepped back into
life.  But it was only for the instant that she paused.  Her face was
blazing with excitement.

"Come!" she cried.  "Come!"

"Take my arm!  Or had I better carry you?" exclaimed DeWitt.

"Huh!" sniffed Rhoda.  "Just try to keep up with me, that's all!"

DeWitt, despite the need for haste, stopped and stared at the girl,
open-mouthed.  Then as he realized what superb health she showed in
every line of face and body, he cried:

"You are well!  You are well!  O Rhoda, I never thought to see you this
way!"

Rhoda squeezed his fingers joyfully.

"I am so strong!  Hurry, John!  Hurry!"

"Where are the Indians?" panted DeWitt, running along beside her.
"What were those shots?"

"Billy Porter found our camp.  He shot Alchise and Injun Tom and he and
Kut-le were wrestling as I ran."  Then Rhoda hesitated.  "Perhaps you
ought to go back and help Billy!"

But John pulled her ahead.

"Leave you until I get you to safety?  Why, Billy himself would half
murder me if I thought of it!  Our camp is over there, a three hours'
trip."  DeWitt pointed to a distant peak.  "If we swing around to the
left, the Indians won't see us!"

Hand in hand the two settled to a swinging trot.  The dreadful fear of
pursuit was on them both.  It submerged their first joy of meeting, and
left them panic-stricken.  For many minutes they ran without speaking.
At last, when well out into the burning heat of the desert, they could
keep up the pace no longer and dropped to a rapid walk.  Still there
came no sound of pursuit.

"Was Porter hurt?" panted John.

"Not when I left," answered Rhoda.

"I wonder what his plan is?" said John.  "He left the camp yesterday to
trail Injun Tom.  We'll go back for him as quick as I can get you to
camp."

Rhoda looked up at DeWitt anxiously.

"You are very tired and worn, John," she said.

"And you!" cried the man, looking down at the girl with the swinging,
tireless stride.  "What miracle has come to you?"

"I never dreamed that there could be health like this!  I--"  She
stopped, with head to one side.  "Do you hear anything?  What do you
suppose they are doing to each other?  Oh, I hope neither of them will
get killed!"

"I hope--  They have all promised to let me deal with Kut-le!" said
DeWitt grimly, pausing to listen intently.  But no sound came across
the burning sands.

Rhoda started at DeWitt's words.  Suddenly her early sense of the
appalling nature of her experience returned to her.  She looked with
new eyes at DeWitt's face.  It was not the same face that she had last
seen at the Newman ranch.  John had the look of a man who has passed