Chapter 17

THE HEART'S OWN BITTERNESS

"I'm not worrying," answered Rhoda stoutly, "except about you. You are shaking with exhaustion while I am as fit as can be."

"Oh, don't bother about me!" exclaimed John. "I'm just a little tired."

But Rhoda was not to be put off.

"How much did you sleep last night?"

"Not much," admitted DeWitt. "I haven't been a heavy sleeper at times ever since you disappeared, strange as that may seem!" Then he grinned. It was pleasant to have Rhoda bully him.

Yet the big fellow actually was sinking with weariness. The fearful hardships that he had undergone had worked havoc with him. Now that the agonizing nerve-strain was lifted he was going to pieces. He stood wavering for a minute, then he slowly sat down in the sand.

Rhoda stood beside him uncertainly and looked from the man to the immovably distant mountain peak. She realized that, in stopping, the risk of recapture was great, yet her desert experiences told her that John must regain some of his strength before the sun caught them. She had little faith that they would tumble upon the camp as easily as John thought, and wanted to prepare for a day of desert heat.

"If we were sure just where the camp lay," she said, "I would go on for help. But as we aren't certain, I'm afraid to be separated from you, John."

John looked up fiercely with his haggard eyes.

"Don't you dare to move six inches from me, Rhoda. It will kill me to lose you now."

"Of course I won't," said Rhoda. "I've had my lesson about losing myself in the desert. But you must have some sleep before we go any farther."

Rhoda spoke with a cheerfulness she did not feel. She looked about for a comfortable resting-place but the desert was barren.

"There's no use trying to find a comfortable bed," she said. "You had better lie down right where you are."

"Honey," said John, "I've no idea of sleeping. It will be time enough for that when we reach camp. But if you think you could stand guard for just ten minutes I will lie flat in the sand and rest. You take my watch and time me."

"That's splendid!" said Rhoda, helping him to clear of rocks and cactus a space long enough to lie in.

"Just ten minutes," said DeWitt, and as he spoke he sank to sleep.

Rhoda stood in the moonlight looking into the man's unconscious face. His new-grown beard gave him a haggard look that was enhanced by the dark circles under his eyes. That wan face touched Rhoda much more than the healthy face of former days. The lines of weariness and pain that never could be fully erased were all for her, she thought with a little catch of her breath. Then with a pitying, affectionate look at the sleeping man came a whimsical smile. Once she had thought no one could equal John in physical vigor. Now she pictured Kut-le's panther strength and endurance, and smiled.

She looked at the watch. Five hours till dawn. She would let John have the whole of that time in which to sleep. His ten minutes would be worse than useless, while to find the camp after the moon had set would be quite out of the question. Her own eyes were wide and sleepless. She sat in the sand beside DeWitt until driven by the cold to pace back and forth. John slept without stirring; the sleep of complete exhaustion. Rhoda was not afraid, nor did she feel lonely. The desert was hers now. There was no wind, but now and again the cactus rustled as if unseen wings had brushed it. The dried heaps of cholla stirred as if unseen paws had pressed them. From afar came the demoniacal laughter of coyotes on their night hunts. But still Rhoda was not afraid.

At first, in the confusion of thoughts that the day's events had crowded on her, her clearest sense was of thankfulness. Then she fell to wondering what had happened to Porter and Kut-le. Suddenly she caught her breath with a shiver. If Porter won there could be but one answer as to Kut-le's fate. John's attitude of mind told that. Rhoda twisted her hands together.

"I will not have him killed!" she whispered. "No! No! I will not have him killed!"

For many minutes she paced back and forth, battling with her fears. Then she suddenly recalled the fact that vengeance was to be saved for John. This uncanny thought comforted her. She had little fear but that she could manage John.

And then in the utter silence of the desert night, staring at the sinking moon, Rhoda asked herself why, when she should have been mad with joy over her own rescue, she was giving all her thoughts to Kut-le's plight! For a moment the question brought a flood of confusion. Then, standing alone in the night beauty of the desert, the girl acknowledged the truth that she had denied even to herself so long. The young Indian's image returned to her endowed with all the dignity of his remarkable physical perfection. She knew now that from the first this physical beauty of his had had a strong appeal to her. She knew now that all his unusual characteristics that at first had seemed so strange to her were the ones that had drawn her to him. His strange mental honesty, his courage, his brutal incisiveness, all had fascinated her. All her days with him returned to her, days of weakness, of anger, then the weeks on the ledge, and the day when she had found the desert, and finally the day just past, to the very moment when Billy Porter had come upon them on the ledge.

Rhoda stood with unseeing eyes while before her inward vision passed a magnificent panorama of the glories through which Kut-le had led her. Chaos of mountain and desert, resplendent with color; cool, sweet depth of cañon; burning height of tortured peak; slope of pungent piñon forest--all wrapped in the haze which is the desert's own.

Rhoda knew the truth; knew that she loved Kut-le! She knew that she loved him with all the passionate devotion for which her rebirth had given her the capacity.

With this acknowledgment, all her calm was swept away. With fingers clasped against her breast, with wide eyes on the brooding night, she wished that she might tell him this that had come to her. If only once more the inscrutable tenderness of his black eyes were upon her! If the deep imperative voice were but sounding in her ears again! If only she could feel now the touch of his powerful arms as he carried her the long sick miles to Chira. Trembling with longing, her gaze fell upon the man sleeping at her feet. She drew a sudden troubled breath. Must she renounce this new rapture of living? Must she?

"Have I found new life in the desert only to lose it?" she whispered. "O Kut-le! Kut-le!"

DeWitt slept on, unmoving, and Rhoda watched him with tragedy-stricken eyes.

"What shall I do!" she whispered, lips quivering, shaking hands twisting together. "Oh, what shall I do!"

She tried to picture a future with Kut-le. She saw his tenderness, his purposefulness, the bigness of his mind and spirit. Then with a cold clutch at her throat came the thought of race barrier, and in a moment Rhoda was plunged into the oldest, the most hopeless, the least solvable of all love's problems. Minute after minute went by and the girl, standing by the sleeping man, fought a fight that shook her slender body and racked her soul. At last she raised her face to the sky.

"I want to do what is right!" she said piteously. "It doesn't matter about me, if only I can decide what is right!" Then after, a pause, "I will marry John! I will!" like a child that has been punished and promises to be good. Still another pause, then, "So that part of me is dead!" and she put her fingers before her eyes and fell to crying, not with the easy tears of a woman but with the deep, agonizing sobs of a man over his dead.

"Kut-le, I wanted you! I wanted you for my mate! If I could have heard you, seen you, felt you once more! Nothing else would have mattered. I wanted you!"

A long hour passed in which Rhoda sat in the sand, limp and quiescent, as though all but wrecked by the storm through which she had passed. Dawn came at last. The air was pregnant with new hope, with a vague uplifting of sense and being that told of the coming of a new day. The east quivered with prismatic colors and suddenly the sun appeared.

Rhoda rose and stooped over DeWitt to smooth the hair back from his forehead.

"Come," she said softly. "It's breakfast time!"

DeWitt sat up bewildered. Then his senses returned.

"Rhoda," he exclaimed, "what do you mean by this!"

Rhoda's smile was a little wan.

"You needed the rest and I didn't!"

DeWitt rose and shook himself like a great dog, then looked at Rhoda wonderingly.

"And you don't look much done up! But you had no right to do such a thing! I told you to give me ten minutes. I feel like a brute. Lie down now and get a little sleep yourself."

"Lie in the sun? Thank you, I'd rather push on to the camp and have some breakfast. How do you feel?"

"Much better! It was fine of you, dear, but it wasn't a fair deal."

"I'll be good from now on!" said Rhoda meekly. "What would you like for breakfast?"

DeWitt looked about him. Already the desert was assuming its brazen aspect.

"Water will be enough for me," he answered, "and nothing else. I am seriously considering a rigid diet for a time."

They both drank sparingly of the water in Rhoda's canteen.

"I have three shots in my Colt," said DeWitt, "but I want to save them for an emergency. But if we don't strike camp pretty soon, I'll try to pot a jack-rabbit."

"We can eat desert mice," said Rhoda. "I know how to catch and cook them!"

"Heaven forbid!" ejaculated DeWitt. "Let's start on at once, if you're not too tired."

So they began the day cheerfully. As the morning wore on and they found no trace of the camp, they began to watch the canteen carefully. Gradually their thirst became so great that the desire for food was quite secondary to it and they made no attempt to hunt for a rabbit. They agreed toward noon to save the last few drops in the canteen until they could no longer do without it.

Hour after hour they toiled in the blinding heat, the strange deep blue of the sky reflecting the brazen light of the desert. In their careful avoiding of the mountain where they had rested at sunset the night before, they gradually worked out into a wide barren space with dunes and rock heaps interchanging.

"This won't do at all," said Dewitt at last, wearily. "We had better try for any old mountain at all in the hope of finding water."

They stood panting, staring at the distant haze of a peak. Trackless and tortuous, the way underfoot was incredibly difficult. Yet the distances melted in ephemeral slopes as lovely in their tints as they were accursed in their reality of cruelty. Rhoda, unaccustomed to day travel, panted and gasped as they walked. But she held her own fairly well, while DeWitt, sick and overstrained at the start, was failing rapidly.

"It's noon now," said John a little thickly. "You had better lie in the shade of that rock for an hour."

"You sleep too!" pleaded Rhoda.

"I'm too hot to sleep. I'll wake you in an hour."

When Rhoda awoke it was to see DeWitt leaning against the rock heap, his lips swollen, his eyes uncertain.

Weak and dizzy herself, she rose and laid her hand on John's, every maternal instinct in her stirring and speaking in her gray eyes.

"Come, dear boy, we mustn't give up so easily."

John lifted the little hand to his cheek.

"I won't give up," he said uncertainly. "I'll take care of you, honey girl!"

"Come on, then!" said Rhoda. "You see that queer bunch of cholla yonder? Let's get as far as that before we stop again!"

With a great effort, DeWitt gathered himself together and, fixing his eyes on the fantastic cactus growth, he plodded desperately through the sand. At the cholla bunch, Rhoda pointed to a jutting lavender rock.

"At that we'll rest for a minute. Come on, John!"

John's sick eyes did not waver but his trembling legs described many circles in their journey to the jutting rock. Distances were so many times what they seemed that Rhoda's little scheme carried them over a mile of desert before DeWitt sank to his knees.

"I'm a sick man," he said huskily as he fell in a limp heap.

Nothing could have appeared more opportunely than this new hardship to take Rhoda's mind off her misery of the night. Nothing could have brought John so near to her as this utter helplessness brought about through his toiling for her. She looked at him with tears of pity in her eyes, while her heart sank with fright. She knew the terrible danger that menaced them. But she closed her lips firmly and looked thoughtfully at the mite of water that remained to them. Then she held the canteen to DeWitt's lips. He pushed it away from him and in another moment or so he rose.

Rhoda, fastening their hopes to another distant cholla, led the way on again. But she too was growing a little light-headed. The distant cactus danced grotesquely and black spots flitted between her and the molten iron over which, her fancy said they traveled. Suddenly she laughed crazily:

"'Twas brillig, and the slythy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe!"

DeWitt laughed hoarsely.

"That's just the way it looks to me, Rhoda. But you're just as crazy as I am."

Rhoda jerked herself together and tried to moisten her lips with her swollen tongue.

"We must take it turn about. When you are crazy I must try to be sane!"

"Good idea!" croaked DeWitt, "only I'm crazy all the time!"

"'O frabjous day! Calloo! Collay! He chortled in his joy!'"

Rhoda patted his hand.

"Poor John! Oh, my poor John! I was not worth all this. You may not have an Apache's strength, but your heart is right!" Two great tears rolled down her cheeks.

DeWitt looked at her seriously.

"You aren't as dry as I am. I haven't enough moisture in me to moisten my eyeballs, let alone cry! I am so cracked and dry that you will have to soak me in the first spring we come to before I'll hold water."

Rhoda laughed weakly and John turned away with a hurt look.

"It's not a joke!" he said.

How long they were, in their staggering, circuitous course, in reaching their goal of cholla, Rhoda never knew. She knew that each heavy foot, tingling and scorched, seemed to drag her back a step for every one that she took forward. She knew that she repeatedly offered the last of their water to John and that he repeatedly refused it, urging it on her. She knew that the pulp of the barrel cactus that she tried to chew turned to bitter sawdust in her mouth and sickened her. Then suddenly, as she struggled to refocus her wandering wits on the cholla, it appeared within touch of her hand.

Afraid to pause, she adopted a new goal in a far mesa, and clutching DeWitt's unresponsive fingers she struggled forward.

And so on and on toward a never nearing goal; now falling, now rising, now pausing to strive to hush Dewitt's cracked voice that wandered aimlessly through all the changes of verse that seemed to his delirium appropriate to the occasion. It seemed to Rhoda that her own brain was reeling as she watched the illimitable space through which they moved. John's voice did not cease.

"Alone! Alone! All, all, alone! Alone on a wide, wide sea! So lonely 'twas that God himself, Scarce seemed there to be!"

"Hush, John! Hush!" pleaded Rhoda.

"Alone! Alone! All, all alone!"

repeated the croaking voice.

"But I'm with you, John!" Rhoda pleaded, but DeWitt rambled on unheeding.

The way grew indescribably rough. The desert floor became a series of sand dunes, a rise and fall of sea-like billows over which they climbed like ants over a new-plowed field. In the hollow of each wave they rested, sinking in the sand, where, breathless and scorching, the air scintillated above their motionless forms. At the crest of each they rested again, the desert wind hurtling the hot sand against their parched skins. Frequently John refused to rise and Rhoda in her half delirium would sink beside him until the mist lifted from her brain and once more the distant mesa forced itself upon her vision.

"Come, John, we will soon be there. We can't keep on this way forever and not reach some place. Please come, dear!"

"'He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside still waters. He restoreth my soul--'"

"Perhaps there will be water there! O John, dear John, if you love me, come!"

"I don't love you, little boy! I love Rhoda Tuttle.

"O for a draught of vintage that hath been Cooled a long age in deep delved earth!"

"Please, John! I'm so sick!"

The man, after two or three attempts, staggered to his feet and stood swaying.

"God help me!" he said. "I can do no more!"

"Yes, you can, John! Yes, you can! Perhaps there is a whole fountain of water there on the mesa!"

The glazed look returned to DeWitt's eyes.

"'Or the pitcher be broken at the fountain,'" he muttered, "'or the wheel broken at the cistern--or the pitcher broken at the fountain, or the wheel--'"

Rhoda threw her arm across her eyes.

"Oh, not that, John! I can't bear that one!"

Again, she stood upon the roof at Chira, looking up into Kut-le's face. Again the low wailing of the Indian women and the indescribable depth and hunger of those dear black eyes. Again the sense of protection and content in his nearness.

"O Kut-le! Kut-le!" she moaned.

Instantly sanity returned to John's eyes.

"Why did you say Kut-le?" he demanded thickly.

"Were you thinking of him?"

"Yes," answered Rhoda simply. "Come on, John!"

DeWitt struggled on bravely to the crest of the next dune.

"I hate that Apache devil!" he muttered. "I am going to kill him!"

Rhoda quickly saw the magic of Kut-le's name.

"Why should you want to kill Kut-le?" she asked as Dewitt paused at the top of the next dune. Instantly he started on.

"Because I hate him! I hate him, the devil!"

"See how near the mesa is, John! Only a little way! Kut-le would say we were poor stuff!"

"No doubt! Well, I'll let a gun give him my opinion of him!"

The sand dunes had indeed beaten themselves out against the wall of a giant mesa. Rhoda followed blindly along the wall and stumbled upon a precipitous trail leading upward.