by Zane Grey
“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 sabedhim at once. ‘But yes, señor,’” I answered, “‘except for the sheep!’”