Kut-le gave a short laugh.
"Listen, Rhoda. Your protests show that you are afraid of me. But you need not be. Your protection lies in the fact that I love you--love you with all the pa.s.sion of a savage, all the restraint of a Caucasian.
I"d rather die than harm you! Why, girl, I"m saving you, not destroying you! Rhoda! Dear one!" He paused and Rhoda could hear his quickened breath. Then he added lightly, "Let"s get on with our little stroll!"
Rhoda wrung her hands and groaned. Only to escape--to escape!
Suddenly turning, she ran down the track. Kut-le watched her, motionless, until she had run perhaps a hundred yards, then with a few mighty leaps he overtook her and gathered her to his great chest.
Moaning, Rhoda lay still.
"Dear," said Kut-le, "don"t exert yourself foolishly. If you must escape, lay your plans carefully. Use your brain. Don"t act like a child. I love you, Rhoda!"
"I loathe you! I loathe you!" whispered the girl.
"You don"t--ah--" He stopped abruptly and set the girl on the ground.
They were standing beside a side-track near a desert water-tank. "I"ve caught my foot in a switch-frog," muttered Kut-le, keeping his hold on Rhoda with one hand while with the other he tugged at his moccasined foot.
Rhoda stood rigid.
"I hear a train!" she cried. "O dear G.o.d, I hear a train!" Then, "The other Indians are too far away to reach you before the train does," she added calmly.
"But I"ll never loose my grip on you," returned the Indian grimly.
He tore at the imprisoned foot, ripping the moccasin and tearing at the road bed. The rails began to sing. Far down the track they saw a star of light Rhoda"s heart stood still. This, then, was to be the end!
After all the months of distant menace, death was to be upon her in a moment! This, then, was to be the solution! And with all the horror of what life might mean to her, she cried out with a sob:
"Oh, not this way! Not this way!"
Kut-le gave her a quick push.
"Hurry," he said, "and try to remember good things of me!"
With a cry of joy, Rhoda jumped from the track, then stopped. There flashed across her inner vision the face of young Cartwell, debonair and dark, with unfathomable eyes; young Cartwell who had saved her life when the scorpion had stung her, who had spent hours trying to lead her back to health. Instantly she turned and staggered back to the Indian.
"I can"t let a human being die like a trapped animal!" she panted, and she threw herself wildly against him.
Kut-le fell at the unexpected impact of her weight and his foot was freed! He lifted Rhoda, leaped from the track, and the second section of the tourist train thundered into the west.
"You are as fine as I thought you were--" he began. But Rhoda was a limp heap at his feet.
The girl came to her senses partially when Kut-le set her in the saddle and fastened her there with strap and blanket. But happily she was practically unconscious for the hour or two that remained till dawn.
Just as day was breaking the Indians made their way across an arroyo and up a long slope to a group of cottonwoods. Here Rhoda was put to bed on a heap of blankets.
Sometime in the afternoon she woke with a clear head. It was the first time in months that she had wakened without a headache. She stared from the shade of the cottonwoods to the distant lavender haze of the desert. There was not a sound in all the world. Mysterious, remote, the desert stared back at her, mocking her little grief. More terrible to her than her danger in Kut-le"s hands, more appalling than the death threat that had hung over her so long, was this sense of awful s.p.a.ce, of barren nothingness with which the desert oppressed her.
Instinctively she turned to look for human companionship. Kut-le and Alchise were not to be seen but Molly nodded beside Rhoda"s blankets and the thin hag Cesca was curled in the gra.s.s near by, asleep.
"You awake? Heap hungry?" asked Molly suddenly.
Rhoda sat up, groaning at the torturing stiffness of her muscles.
"Where is Kut-le?" she asked.
"Gone get "em supper. Alchise gone too."
"Molly," Rhoda took the rough brown hand between both her soft cold palms, "Molly, will you help me to run away?"
Molly looked from the clasping fingers up to Rhoda"s sweet face. Molly was a squaw, dirty and ignorant. Rhoda was the delicate product of a highly cultivated civilization, egoistic, narrow-viewed, self-centered.
And yet Rhoda, looking into Molly"s deep brown eyes, saw there that limitless patience and fort.i.tude and gentleness which is woman"s without regard to cla.s.s or color. And not knowing why, the white girl bowed her head on the squaw"s fat shoulder and sobbed a little. A strange look came into Molly"s face. She was childless and had worked fearfully to justify her existence to her tribe. Few hands had touched hers in tenderness. Few voices had appealed to her for sympathy.
Suddenly Molly clasped Rhoda in her strong arms and swayed back and forth with her gently.
"You no cry!" she said. "You no cry, little Sun-head, you no cry!"
"Molly, dear kind Molly, won"t you help me to get back to my own people? Suppose it was your daughter that a white man had stolen! O Molly, I want to go home!"
Molly still rocked and spoke in the singsong voice one uses to a sobbing child.
"You no run "way! Kut-le catch right off! Make it all harder for you!"
Rhoda shivered a little.
"If I once get away, Kut-le never will catch me alive!"
Molly chuckled indulgently.
"How you run? No _sabe_ how eat, how drink, how find the trail!
Better stay with Molly."
"I would wait till I thought we were near a town. Won"t you help me?
Dear, kind Molly, won"t you help me?"
"Kut-le kill Molly with cactus torture!"
"But you go with me!" The sobs ceased and Rhoda sat back on her blankets as the idea developed. "You go with me and I"ll make you--"
Neither noticed the soft thud of moccasined feet. Suddenly Alchise seized Molly"s black hair and with a violent jerk pulled the woman backward. Rhoda forgot her stiffened muscles, forgot her gentle ancestry. She sprang at Alchise with catlike fury and struck his fingers from Molly"s hair.
"You fiend! I wish I could shoot you!" she panted, her fingers twitching.
Alchise retreated a step.
"She try help "em run!" he said sullenly.
"She was not! And no matter if she was! Don"t you touch a woman before me!"
A swift shadow crossed the camp and Alchise was hurled six feet away.
"What"s the matter!" cried Kut-le. "Has he laid finger on you, Rhoda?"
He strode to her side and looked down at her with eyes in which struggled anger and anxiety.
"No!" blazed Rhoda. "But he pulled Molly over backward by her hair!"