Part 8 (2/2)

”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 s.h.i.+rt, 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 circ.u.mstances?”

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.”

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