The Heart of the Desert Part 14

"No! You no wash! No use! You just get cold--heap cold!"

"Molly!" called Kut-le's authoritative voice.

Molly went flying toward the packs, from which she returned with a canteen and a tiny pitch-smeared basket. Kut-le followed with a towel.

He grinned at Rhoda.

"Molly is possessed with the idea that anything as frail as you would be snuffed out like a candle by a drop of water. You and I each possess a lone lorn towel which we must wash out ourselves till the end of the trip. The squaws don't know when a thing is clean."

Rhoda took the towel silently, and the young Indian, after waiting a minute as if in hope of a word from her, left the girl to her difficult toilet. When Rhoda had finished she picked up the field-gla.s.ses that Kut-le had left on her blankets and with her back to the Indians sat down on a rock to watch the desert.

The sordid discomforts of the camp seemed to her unbearable. She hated the blue haze of the desert below and beyond her. She hated the very ponies that Alchise was leading up from water. It was the fourth day since her abduction. Rhoda could not understand why John and the Newmans were so slow to overtake her. She knew nothing as yet of the skill of her abductors. She was like an ignorant child placed in a new world whose very ABC was closed to her. After always having been cared for and protected, after never having known a hardship, the girl suddenly was thrust into an existence whose savage simplicity was sufficient to try the hardiest man.

Supper was eaten in silence, Kut-le finally giving up his attempts to make conversation. It was dusk when they mounted and rode up the mountain. Near the crest a whirling cloud of mist enveloped them. It became desperately cold and Rhoda shivered beneath her Navajo but Kut-le gave no heed to her. He led on and on, the horses slipping, the cold growing every minute more intense. At last there appeared before them a dim figure silhouetted against a flickering light. Kut-le halted his party and rode forward; Rhoda saw the dim figure rise hastily and after a short time Kut-le called back.

"Come ahead!"

The little camp was only an open s.p.a.ce at the canon edge, with a sheepskin shelter over a tiny fire. Beside the fire stood a sheep-herder, a swarthy figure wrapped from head to foot in sheepskins.

Over in the darkness by the mountain wall were the many nameless sounds that tell of animals herding for the night. The shepherd greeted them with the perfect courtesy of the Mexican.

"Senors, the camp is yours!"

Kut-le lifted the shivering Rhoda from her horse. The rain was lessening but the cold was still so great that Rhoda huddled gratefully by the little fire under the sheepskin shelter. Kut-le refused the Mexican's offer of tortillas and the man sat down to enjoy their society. He eyed Rhoda keenly.

"Ah! It is a senorita!" Then he gasped. "It is perhaps the Senorita Rhoda Tuttle!"

Rhoda jumped to her feet.

"Yes! Yes! How did you know?"

Kut-le glared at the herder menacingly, but the little fellow did not see. He spoke up bravely, as if he had a message for Rhoda.

"Some people told me yesterday. They look for her everywhere!"

Rhoda's eyes lighted joyfully.

"Who? Where?" she cried.

Kut-le spoke concisely:

"You know nothing!" he said.

The Mexican looked into the Apache's eyes and shivered slightly.

"Nothing, of course, Senor," he replied.

But Rhoda was not daunted.

"Who were they?" she repeated. "What did they say? Where did they go?"

The herder glanced at Rhoda and shook his head.

"_Quien sabe_?"

Rhoda turned to Kut-le in anger.

"Don't be more brutal than you have to be!" she cried. "What harm can it do for this man to give me word of my friends?"

Kut-le's eyes softened.

"Answer the senorita's questions, amigo," he said.

The Mexican began eagerly.

"There were three. They rode up the trail one day ago. They called the dark man Porter, the big blue-eyed one DeWitt, and the yellow-haired one Newman."

Rhoda clasped her hands with a little murmur of relief.

"The blue-eyed one acted as if locoed. They cursed much at a name, Kut-le. But otherwise they talked little. They went that way,"

pointing back over the trail. "They had found a scarf with a stone tied in it--"

"What's that?" interrupted Kut-le sharply.

Rhoda's eyes shone in the firelight.

"'Not an overturned pebble escapes his eye,'" she said serenely.

"Bully for you!" exclaimed Kut-le, smiling at Rhoda in understanding.

"However, I guess we will move on, having gleaned this interesting news!"

He remounted his little party. Rhoda reeled a little but she made no protest. As they took to the trail again the sheep-herder stood by the fire, watching, and Rhoda called to him:

"If you see them again tell them that I'm all right but that they must hurry!"

Rhoda felt new life in her veins after the meeting with the sheep-herder and finished the night's trail in better shape than she had done before. Yet not the next day nor for many days did they sight pursuers. With ingenuity that seemed diabolical, Kut-le laid his course. He seldom moved hurriedly. Indeed, except for the fact that the traveling was done by night, the expedition had every aspect of unlimited leisure.

As the days pa.s.sed, Rhoda forced herself to the calm of desperation.

Slowly she realized that she was in the hands of the masters of the art of flight, an art that the very cruelty of the country abetted. But to her utter astonishment her delirium of physical misery began to lift.

Saddle stiffness after the first two weeks left her. Though Kut-le still fastened her to the saddle by the waist strap and rested her for a short time every hour or so during the night's ride, the hours in the saddle ceased to tax her strength. She was surprised to find that she could eat--eat the wretched cooking of the squaws!

At last she laid out a definite course for herself. Every night on the trail and at every camp she tried to leave some mark for the whites--a scratch on pebble or stone, a bit of marked yucca or a twisted cat's-claw. She ceased entirely to speak to Kut-le, treating him with a contemptuous silence that was torture to the Indian though he gave no outward sign.

Molly was her devoted friend and Rhoda derived great comfort from this faithful servitor. Rhoda sat in the camp one afternoon with the two squaws while Kut-le and Alchise were off on a turkey hunt. Some of the girl's pallor had given way to a delicate tan. The dark circles about her eyes had lightened a little. Molly was busily pounding gra.s.s-seeds between two stones. Rhoda watched her idly. Suddenly a new idea sent the blood to her thin cheeks.

Why shouldn't she learn to make seed meal, to catch and cook rabbits, to distinguish edible cactus from inedible? Then indeed she would be able to care for herself on the trail! To Rhoda, who never had worked with her hands, who indeed had come to look on manual labor as belonging to inferiors, the idea was revolutionary. For a long time she turned it over in her mind, watching Molly the while. The most violent housewifely task that Rhoda ever had undertaken had been the concocting of chafing-dish messes at school.

"Molly," she said suddenly, "teach me how to do that!"

Molly paused and grinned delightedly.