Chapter 4

THE INDIAN WAY

It was some time before the call of a coyote close beside her penetrated Rhoda's senses. At its third or fourth repetition, she sighed and opened her eyes. Night had come, the luminous lavender night of the desert. Her first discovery was that she was seated on a horse, held firmly by a strong arm across her shoulders. Next she found that her uneasy breathing was due to the cloth tied round her mouth. With this came realization of her predicament and she tossed her arms in a wild attempt to free herself.

The arm about her tightened, the horse stopped, and the voice went on repeating the coyote call, clearly, mournfully. Rhoda ceased her struggling for a moment and looked at the face so close to her own. In the starlight only the eyes and the dim outline of the features were visible, and the eyes were as dark and menacing to her as the desert night that shut her in.

Mad with fear, Rhoda strained at the rigid arm. Kut-le dropped the reins and held her struggling hands, ceased his calling and waited. Off to the left came an answering call and Kut-le started the pony rapidly toward the sound. In a few moments Rhoda saw a pair of horsemen. Utterly exhausted, she sat in terror awaiting her fate. Kut-le gave a low-voiced order. One of the riders immediately rode forward, leading another horse. Kut-le slipped another blanket from this and finished binding Rhoda to her saddle so securely that she scarcely could move a finger. Then he mounted his horse, and he and one of the Indians started off, leading Rhoda's horse between them and leaving the third Indian standing silently behind them.

Rhoda was astride of the pony, half sitting, half lying along his neck. The Indians put the horses to a trot and immediately the discomfort of her position was made agony by the rough motion. But the pain cleared her mind.

Her first thought was that she never would recover from the disgrace of this episode. Following this thought came fury at the man who was so outraging her. It only he would free her hands for a moment she would choke him! Her anger would give her strength for that! Then she fought against her fastenings. They held her all but motionless and the sense of her helplessness brought back the fear panic. Utterly helpless, she thought! Flying through darkness to an end worse than death! In the power of a naked savage! Her fear almost robbed her of her reason.

After what seemed to her endless hours, the horses were stopped suddenly. She felt her fastenings removed. Then Kut-le lifted her to the ground where she tumbled, helpless, at his feet. He stooped and took the gag from her mouth. Immediately with what fragment of strength remained to her, she screamed again and again. The two Indians stood stolidly watching her for a time, then Kut-le knelt in the sand beside her huddled form and laid his hand on her arm.

"There, Rhoda," he said, "no one can hear you. You will only make yourself sick."

Rhoda struck his hand feebly.

"Don't touch me!" she cried hoarsely. "Don't touch me, you beast! I loathe you! I am afraid of you! Don't you dare to touch me!"

At this Kut-le imprisoned both her cold hands in one of his warm palms and held them despite her struggles, while with the other hand he smoothed her tumbled hair from her eyes.

"Poor frightened little girl," he said, in his rich voice. "I wish I might have done otherwise. But there was no other way. I don't know that I believe much in your God but I guess you do. So I tell you, Rhoda, that by your faith in Him, you are absolutely safe in my hands!"

Rhoda caught her breath in a childlike sob while she sstill struggled to recover her hands.

"I loathe you!" she panted. "I loathe you! I loathe you!"

But Kut-le would not free the cold little hands.

"But do you fear me, too? Answer me! Do you fear me?"

The moon had risen and Rhoda looked into the face that bent above hers. This was a naked savage with hawk-like face. Yet the eyes were the ones that she had come to know so well, half tragic, somber, but clear and, toward her, tender, very, very tender. With a shuddering sigh, Rhoda looked away. But against her own volition she found herself saying:

"I'm not afraid now! But I loathe you, you Apache Indian!"

Something very like a smile touched the grim mouth of the Apache.

"I don't hate you, you Caucasian!" he answered quietly.

He chafed the cold hands for a moment, in silence. Then he lifted her to her saddle. But Rhoda was beyond struggle, beyond even clinging to the saddle. Kut-le caught her as she reeled.

"Don't tie me!" she panted. "Don't tie me! I won't fight! I won't even scream, if you won't tie me!"

"But you can't sit your saddle alone," replied Kut-le. "I'll have to tie you."

Once more he lifted her to the horse. Once more with the help of his silent companion he fastened her with blankets. Once more the journey was begun. For a little while, distraught and uncertain what course to pursue, Rhoda endured the misery of position and motion in silence. Then the pain was too much and she cried out in protest. Kut-le brought the horses to a walk.

"You certainly have about as much spunk as a chicken with the pip!" he said contemptuously. "I should think your loathing would brace you up a little!"

Stung by the insult to a sudden access of strength, as the Indian had intended her to be, Rhoda answered, "You beast!" but as the horses swung into the trot she made no protest for a long hour. Then once more her strength failed her and she fell to crying with deep-drawn sobs that shook her entire body. After a few moments of this, Kut-le drew close to her.

"Don't!" he said huskily. "Don't!" And again he laid his hand on her shoulder.

Rhoda shuddered but could not cease her sobs. Kut-le seemed to hesitate for a few moments. Then he reached over, undid Rhoda's fastenings and lifted her limp body to the saddle before him, holding her against his broad chest as if he were coddling a child. Then he started the horses on. Too exhausted to struggle, Rhoda lay sobbing while the young Indian sat with his tragic eyes fastened steadily on the mysterious distances of the trail. Finally Rhoda sank into a stupor and, seeing this, Kut-le doubled the speed of the horses.

It was daylight when Rhoda opened her eyes. For a time she lay at ease listening to the trill of birds and the trickle of water. Then, with a start, she raised her head. She was lying on a heap of blankets on a stone ledge. Above her was the boundless sapphire of the sky. Close beside her a little spring bubbled from the blank wall of the mountain. Rhoda lay in helpless silence, looking about her, while the appalling nature of her predicament sank into her consciousness.

Against the wall squatted two Indian women. They were dressed in rough short skirts, tight-fitting calico waists and high leather moccasins. Their black hair was parted in the middle and hung free. Their swarthy features were well cut but both of the women were dirty and ill kept. The younger, heavier squaw had a kindly face, with good eyes, but her hair was matted with clay and her fingers showed traces of recent tortilla making. The older woman was lean and wiry, with a strange gleam of maliciousness and ferocity in her eyes. Her forehead was elaborately tattooed with symbols and her toothless old jaws were covered with blue tribal lines.

Kut-le and his friend of the night lounged on a heap of rock at the edge of the ledge. The strange Indian was well past middle age, tall and dignified. He was darker than Kut-le. His face was thin and aquiline. His long hair hung in elf locks over his shoulders. His toilet was elaborate compared with that of Kut-le, for he wore a pair of overalls and a dilapidated flannel shirt, unbelted and fluttering its ends in the morning breeze. As if conscious of her gaze, Kut-le turned and looked at Rhoda. His magnificent height and proportions dwarfed the tall Indian beside him.

"Good-morning, Rhoda!" he said gravely.

The girl looked at the beautiful naked body and reddened.

"You beast!" she said clearly.

Kut-le looked at her with slightly contracted eyes. Then he spoke to the fat squaw. She rose hastily and lifted a pot from the little fire beside the spring. She dipped a steaming cup of broth from this and brought it to Rhoda's side. The girl struck it away. Kut-le walked slowly over, picked up the empty cup at which the squaw stood staring stupidly and filled it once more at the kettle. Then he held it out to Rhoda. His nearness roused the girl to frenzy. With difficulty she brought her stiffened body to a sitting position. Her beautiful gray eyes were black with her sense of outrage.

"Take it away, beast!" she panted.

Kut-le held her gaze.

"Drink it, Rhoda!" he said quietly.

The girl returned his look for a moment then, hating herself for her weakness, she took the cup and drained it. Kut-le tossed the cup to the squaw, pushed Rhoda back to her blankets and covered her very gently. Then he went back to his boulder. The girl lay staring up at the sky. Utterly merciless it gleamed above her. But before she could more than groan she was asleep.

She slept as she had not slept for months. The slanting rays of the westering sun wakened her. She sat up stiffly. The squaws were unpacking a burlap bag. They were greasy and dirty but they were women and their nearness gave Rhoda a vague sense of protection. They in turn gazed at the tangled glory of her hair, at the hopeless beauty of her eyes, at the pathos of the drooping mouth, with unfeigned curiosity.

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.