The Heart of the Desert Part 27

"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 amus.e.m.e.nt.

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 s.p.a.ces 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 canon 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 fl.u.s.tered squaws and leaning on Rhoda only enough to feel the tender girlish shoulders beneath the worn blue blouse.

In the camp, Rhoda a.s.sumed 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 a.s.suming 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 a.s.sume 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 canons that led beneath ranges of surpa.s.sing majesty, roused in her a pa.s.sion 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 canon 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 gra.s.s, from bear gra.s.s 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.