The Heart of the Desert Part 17

A sudden light of pa.s.sionate 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 tete-a-tete.

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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sions 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 hoa.r.s.ely. "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 gla.s.s. Moving toward them, silent as ghosts in the veil-like dawn, and cutting them from the mesa, was a group of hors.e.m.e.n.

CHAPTER IX