The Heart of the Desert

At earliest peep of dawn the squaws were astir waiting for Kut-le, who shortly staggered into camp with a load of meat on his shoulder. Alchise was with him.

"Mule meat!" said Kut-le to Rhoda. "I went to find horses but there was nothing but an old lame mule, I brought him back this way!"

"Heavens!" ejaculated Rhoda.

The squaws worked busily, cutting the meat into strips which they hung over their shoulders to sun dry during the day. Alchise cleansed a length of mule's intestine in the spring, to serve as a canteen. Rhoda gave small heed to these preparations. She was too ill and feverish even to be disgusted by them. She refused to eat but drank constantly from the spring. When at Kut-le's command she took up the march with the others the young man eyed her anxiously. He slung Molly's canteen from his own to Alchise's shoulder and felt Rhoda's pulse.

"This water was bad for you," he said. "But it was the only spring within miles. Perhaps you will throw off the effects of it when we get into the heat of the sun."

Rhoda made no reply but staggered miserably after Molly. The spring lay in a pocket between mountains and mesa. The mountains seemed cruelly high to Rhoda as she looked at them and thought of toiling across them. With head sunk on her breast and feverishly twitching hands she followed for half an hour. Then Kut-le turned.

"I'm going to carry you, Rhoda," he said.

The girl shrank away from him.

"You and Molly and all of them think I'm just a parasite," she muttered. "You don't have to do anything for me! Just let me drop anywhere and die!"

Kut-le looked at her strangely. Without comment, he picked her up. There was a sternly tender look on his face that never had been there before. He did not carry her dispassionately today, but very gently. Something in his manner pierced through Rhoda's half delirium and she looked up at him with a faint replica of her old lovely smile that Kut-le had not seen since he had stolen her. He trembled at its beauty and started forward at a tremendous pace.

"I'll get you to good water by noon," he said.

At noon they were well up in the mountains by a clear spring fringed with aspens. Watercress grew below it, and high above it were pines and junipers. It was a spot of surpassing loveliness, but Rhoda, tossing and panting, could not know it, Kut-le laid his burden on the ground and Molly drew off her tattered petticoat to lay beneath the feverish head. The young Apache stood looking down at the little figure, so graceful in its boyish abandonment of gesture, so pitiful in its broken unconsciousness. Molly bathed the burning face and hands in the pure cold water, muttering tender Apache phrases. Kut-le constantly interrupted her to change the girl's position. For an hour or so he waited for the fever to turn. By three o'clock there was no change for the better and he left Rhoda's side to pace back and forth by the spring in anxious thought.