by Zane Grey
Kut-le still was watching the desert. The madness of the night before had lifted a little, leaving Rhoda with some of her old poise. After several attempts she rose and made her staggering way to Kut-le’s side.
“Kut-le,” she said, “perhaps you will tell me what you mean by this outrage?”
The young Indian, turned to her. White and exhausted, heavy hair in confusion, Rhoda still was lovely.
“You seem to have more interest in life,” he said, “than you have had since I have known you. I thought the experiment would have that effect!”
“You brute!” cried Rhoda. “Can’t you see how silly you are? You will be caught and lynched before the day is passed.”
Kut-le smiled.
“Pshaw! Three Apaches can outwit a hundred white men on the trail!”
Rhoda caught her breath.
“Oh, Kut-le, how could you do this thing! How could you! I am disgraced forever! Let me go, Kut-le! Let me go! I’ll not even ask you for a horse. Just let me go by myself!”
“You are better off with me. You will acknowledge that, yourself, before I am through with you.”
“Better off!” Rhoda’s appalled eyes cut the Indian deeper than words. “Better off! Why, Kut-le, I am a dying woman! You will just have to leave me dead beside the trail somewhere. Look at me! Look at my hands! See how emaciated I am! See how I tremble! I am a sick wreck, Kut-le. You cannot want me! Let me go! Try, try to remember all that you learned of pity from the whites! O Kut-le, let me go!”
“I haven’t forgotten what I learned from the whites,” replied the young man. He looked off at the desert with a quiet smile. “Now I want the whites to learn from me.
“But can’t you see what a futile game you are playing? John DeWitt and Jack must be on your trail now!”
There was a cruel gleam in the Apache’s eyes.
“Don’t be too sure! They are going to spend a few days looking for the foolish Eastern girl who took a stroll and lost her way in the desert. How can they dream that you are stolen?”
Rhoda wrung her hands.
“What shall I do! What shall I do! What an awful, awful thing to come to me! As if life had not been hard enough! This catastrophe! This disgrace!”
Kut-le eyed her speculatively.
“It’s all race prejudice, you know. I have the education of the white with the intelligence and physical perfection of the Indian; DeWitt is nowhere near my equal.”
Rhoda’s eyes blazed.
“Don’t speak of DeWitt! You’re not fit to!”
“Yet,” very quietly, “you said the other night that I had as good a brain and was as attractive as any man of your acquaintance!”
“I was a fool!” exclaimed Rhoda.
Kut-le rose and took a stride or two up and down the ledge. Then he folded his arms across his chest and stopped before Rhoda, who leaned weakly against the boulder.
“I am going to tell you what my ideas are,” he said. “You are intelligent and will understand me no matter how bitter my words may make you at first. Now look here. Lots of white men are in love with you. Even Billy Porter went off his head. But I guess DeWitt is a pretty fair sample of the type of men you drew, well educated, strong, well-bred and Eastern to the backbone. And they love you as you are, delicate, helpless, appealing, thoroughbred, but utterly useless!
“Except that they hate to see you suffer, they wouldn’t want you to change. Now I love you for the possibilities that I see in you. I wouldn’t think of marrying you as you are. It would be an insult to my good blood. Your beauty is marred by your illness. You have absolutely no sense of responsibility toward life. You think that life owes everything to you, that you pay your way with your beauty. If you didn’t die, but married DeWitt, you would go on through life petted and babied, bridge-playing and going out to lectures, childless, incompetent, self-satisfied—and an utter failure!
“Now I think that humans owe everything to life and that women owe the most of all because they make the race. The more nature has done for them, the more they owe. I believe that you are a thousand times worth saving. I am going to keep you out here in the desert until you wake to your responsibility to yourself and to life. I am going to strip your veneering of culture from you and make you see yourself as you are and life as it is—life, big and clean and glorious, with its one big tenet: keep body and soul right and reproduce your kind. I am going to make you see bigger things in this big country than you ever dreamed of.”
He stopped and Rhoda sat appalled, the Indian watching her. To relieve herself from his eyes Rhoda turned toward the desert. The sun had all but touched the far horizon. Crimson and gold, purple and black, desert and sky merged in one unspeakable glory. But Rhoda saw only emptiness, only life’s cruelty and futility and loneliness. And once more she wrung her feeble hands.
Kut-le spoke to Molly, the fat squaw. She again brought Rhoda a cup of broth. This time Rhoda drank it mechanically, then sat in abject wretchedness awaiting the next move of her tormentor. She had not long to wait. Kut-le took a bundle from his saddle and began to unfasten it before Rhoda.
“You must get into some suitable clothes,” he said. “Put these on.”
Rhoda stared at the clothing Kut-le was shaking out. Then she gave him a look of disgust. There was a pair of little buckskin breeches, exquisitely tanned, a little blue flannel shirt, a pair of high-laced hunting boots and a sombrero. She made no motion toward taking the clothes.
“Can’t you see,” Kut-le went on, “that, at the least, you will be in my power for a day or two, that you must ride and that the clothes you have on are simply silly? Why not be as comfortable as possible, under the circumstances?”
The girl, with the conventions of ages speaking in her disgusted face, the savage with his perfect physique bespeaking ages of undistorted nature, eyed each other narrowly.
“I shall keep on my own clothes,” said Rhoda distinctly. “Believe me, you alone give the party the primitive air you admire!”
Kut-le’s jaw hardened.
“Rhoda Tuttle, unless you put these clothes on at once I shall call the squaws and have them put on you by force.”
Into Rhoda’s face came a look of despair. Slowly she put out a shaking hand and took the clothes.
“I can’t argue against a brute,” she said. “The men I have known have been gentlemen. Tell one of your filthy squaws to come and help me.”
“Molly! Pronto!” Like a brown lizard the fat squaw scuttled to Rhoda’s side.
In a little dressing-room formed by fallen rock, Rhoda put on the boy’s clothing. Molly helped the girl very gently. When she was done she smoothed the blue-shirted shoulder complacently.
“Heap nice!” she said. “Make ’em sick squaw heap warm. You no ’fraid! Kut-le say cut off nose, kill ’em with cactus torture, if Injuns not good to white squaw.”
The touch was the touch of a woman and Molly, though a squaw, had a woman’s understanding. Rhoda gave a little sob.
“Kut-le, he good!” Molly went on. “He a big chief’s son. He strong, rich. You no be afraid. You look heap pretty.”
Involuntarily Rhoda glanced at herself. The new clothes were very comfortable. With the loveliness and breeding that neither clothing nor circumstance could mar, Rhoda was a fascinating figure. She was tall for a woman, but now she looked a mere lad. The buckskin clung like velvet. The high-laced boots came to her knees. The sombrero concealed all of the golden hair save for short curling locks in front. She would have charmed a painter, Kut-le thought, as she stepped from her dressing-room; but he kept his voice coolly impersonal.
“All right, you’re in shape to travel, now. Where are your other clothes? Molly, bring them all here!”
Rhoda, followed the squaw and together they folded the cast-off clothing. Rhoda saw that her scarf had
blown near the cañon edge. A quick thought came to her. Molly was fully occupied with muttering adoration of the dainty underwear. Rhoda tied a pebble into the scarf and dropped it far out into the depths below. Then she returned to Molly.
CHAPTER V
THE PURSUIT
As twilight deepened, Katherine lay in the hammock thankful for the soothing effect of the darkness on her aching eyes. She felt a little troubled about Kut-le. She was very fond of the young Indian. She understood him as did no one else, perhaps, and had the utmost faith in his honor and loyalty. She suspected that Rhoda had had much to do with the young Indian’s sudden departure and she felt irritated with the girl, though at the same time she acknowledged that Rhoda had done only what she, Katherine, had advised—had treated Kut-le as if he had been a white man!
She watched the trail for Rhoda’s return but darkness came and there was no sign of the frail figure. A little disturbed, she walked to the corral bars and looked down to the lights of the cowboys’ quarters. If only John DeWitt and Jack would return! But she did not expect them before midnight. She returned to the house and telephoned to the ranch foreman.
“Don’t you worry, ma’am,” he answered cheerily. “No harm could come to her! She just walked till it got dark and is just starting for home now, I bet! She can’t have got out of sight of the ranch lights.”
“But she may have! You can’t tell what she’s done, she’s such a tenderfoot,” insisted Katherine nervously. “She may have been hurt!”
It was well that Katherine could not see the foreman’s face during the conversation. It had a decided scowl of apprehension, but he managed a cheerful laugh.
“Well, you have got nervous, Mrs. Newman! I’ll just send three or four of the boys out to meet her. Eh?”
“Oh, yes, do!” cried Katherine. “I shall feel easier. Good-by!”
Dick Freeman dropped the receiver and hurried into the neighboring bunk-house.
“Boys,” he said quietly, “Mrs. Newman just ’phoned me that Miss Tuttle went to walk at sunset, to be gone half an hour. She ain’t got back yet. She is alone. Will some of you come with me?”
Every hand of cards was dropped before Dick was half through his statement. In less than twenty minutes twenty cowboys were circling slowly out into the desert. For two hours Katherine paced from the living-room to the veranda, from the veranda to the corral. She changed her light evening gown to her khaki riding habit. Her nervousness grew to panic. She sent Li Chung to bed, then she paced the lawn, listening, listening.
At last she heard the thud of hoofs and Dick Freeman dismounted in the light that streamed from the open door.
“We haven’t found her, Mrs. Newman. Has Mr. Newman got back? I think we must get up an organized search.”
Katherine could feel her heart thump heavily.
“No, he hasn’t. Have you found her trail?”
“No; it’s awful hard to trail in the dark, and the desert for miles around the ranch is all cut up with footprints and hoof-marks, you know.”
Katherine wrung her hands.
“Oh, poor little Rhoda!” she cried. “What shall we do!”
“No harm can come to her,” insisted Dick. “She will know enough to sit tight till daylight, then we will have her before the heat gets up.”
“Oh, if she only will!” moaned Katherine. “Do whatever you think best, Dick, and I’ll send Jack and John DeWitt to you as soon as they return.”
Dick swung himself to the saddle again.
“Better go in and read something, Mrs. Newman. You mustn’t worry yourself sick until you are sure you have something to worry about.”
How she passed the rest of the night, Katherine never knew. A little after midnight, Jack came in, his face tense and anxious. Katherine paled as she saw his expression. She knew he had met some of the searchers. When Jack saw the color leave his wife’s pretty cheeks, he kissed her very tenderly and for a moment they clung to each other silently, thinking of the delicate girl adrift on the desert.
“Where is John DeWitt?” asked Katherine after a moment.
“He’s almost crazy. He’s with Dick Freeman. Only stopped for a fresh horse.”
“They have no trace?” questioned Katherine.
Jack shook his head.
“You know what a proposition it is to hunt for as small an object as a human, in the desert. Give me your smelling salts and the little Navajo blanket. One—one can’t tell whether she’s hurt or not.”
Katherine began to sob as she obeyed.
“You are all angel good not to blame me, but I know it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have let her go. But she is so sensible, usually.”
“Dear heart!” said Jack, rolling up the Navajo. “Any one that knows dear old Rhoda knows that what she will, she will, and you are not to blame. Go to bed and sleep if you can.”
“Oh, Jack, I can’t! Let me go with you, do!”
But Jack shook his head.
“You aren’t strong enough to do any good and some one must stay here to run things.”
So again Katherine was left to pace the veranda. All night the search went on. Jack sent messages to the neighboring ranches and the following morning fifty men were in the saddle seeking Rhoda’s trail. Jack also sent into the Pueblo country for Kut-le, feeling that his aid would be invaluable. It would take some time to get a reply from the Indians and in the meantime the search went on rigorously, with no trace of the trail to be found.
John DeWitt did not return to the ranch until the afternoon after Rhoda’s disappearance. Then, disheveled, with bloodshot eyes, cracked lips and blistered face, he dropped exhausted on the veranda steps. Katherine and Jack greeted him with quiet sympathy.
“I came in to get fixed up for a long cruise,” said John. “My pony went lame, and I want a flannel shirt instead of this silk thing I had on last night. I wish to God Kut-le would come! I suppose he could read what we are blind to.”
“You bet!” cried Jack. “I expect an answer from his friends this afternoon. I just had a telegram from Porter, in answer to one I sent him this morning. I caught him at Brown’s and he will be here this afternoon. He knows almost as much as an Indian about following a trail.”
They all spoke in the hushed tones one employs in the sick-room. Jack tried to persuade DeWitt to eat and sleep but he refused, his forced calm giving way to a hoarse, “For heaven’s sake, can I rest when she is dying out there!”
John had not finished his feverish preparations when Billy Porter stalked into the living-room. As he entered, the telephone rang and Jack answered it. Then he returned to the eager group.
“Kut-le has gone on a long hunt with some of his people. They don’t know where he went and refuse to look for him.”
Billy Porter gave a hard, mirthless laugh.
“Why certainly! Jack, you ought to have a hole bored into your head to let in a little light. Kut-le gone. Can’t find Rhoda’s trail. Kut-le in love with Rhoda. Kut-le an Indian. Rhoda refuses him—he goes off—gets some of his chums and when he catches Rhoda alone he steals her. He will keep a man behind, covering his trail. Oh, you easy Easterners make me sick!”
The Newmans and DeWitt stood staring at Porter with horror in their eyes. The clock ticked for an instant then DeWitt gave a groan and bowed his head against the mantelpiece. Katherine ran to him and tried to pull his head to her little shoulder.
“O John, don’t! Don’t! Maybe Billy is right. I’m afraid he is! But one thing I do know. Rhoda is as safe in Kut-le’s hands as she would be in Jack’s. I know it, John!”
John did not move, but at Katherine’s words the color came back into Jack Newman’s face.
“That’s right!” he said stoutly. “It’s a devilish thing for Kut-le to do. But she’s safe, John, old boy, I’m sure she is.”
; Billy Porter, conscience-stricken at the effect of his words, clapped John on the shoulder.
“Aw shucks! I let my Injun hate get the best of my tongue. Of course she’s safe enough; only the darn devil’s got to be caught before he gets to Mexico and makes some padre marry ’em. So it’s us to the saddle a whole heap.”
“We’d better get an Indian to help trail,” said Jack.
“You’ll have a sweet time getting an Injun to trail Kut-le!” said Porter. “The Injuns half worship him. They think he’s got some kind of strong medicine; you know that. You get one and he’ll keep you off the trail instead of on. I can follow the trail as soon as he quits covering it. Get the canteens and come on. We don’t need a million cowboys running round promiscuous over the sand. Numbers don’t help in trailing an Injun. It’s experience and patience. It may take us two weeks and we’ll outfit for that. But we’ll get him in the end. Crook always did.”
There was that in Billy Porter’s voice which put heart into his listeners. John DeWitt lifted his head, and while his blue eyes returned the gaze of the others miserably, he squared his shoulders doggedly.
“I’m ready,” he said briefly.
“Oh, let me come!” cried Katherine. “I can’t bear this waiting!”
Billy smiled.
“Why, Mrs. Jack, you’d be dried up and blowed away before the first day was over.”
“But Rhoda is enduring it!” protested Katherine, with quivering lips.
“God!” John DeWitt muttered and flung himself from the house to the corral. The other two followed him at once.
It was mid-afternoon when the three rode into the quivering yellow haze of the desert followed by a little string of pack horses. It was now nearing twenty-four hours since Rhoda had disappeared and in that time there had been little sand blowing. This meant that the trail could be easily followed were it found. The men rode single file, Billy Porter leading. All wore blue flannel shirts and khaki trousers. John DeWitt rode Eastern park fashion, with short stirrup, rising from the saddle with the trot. Jack and Billy rode Western fashion, long stirrup, an inseparable part of their horses, a fashion that John DeWitt was to be forced to learn in the fearful days to come.