“There never was anything bigger and finer than this open desert, was there?”

Rhoda turned from staring at the distant mesas and eyed the young Indian wonderingly.

“Why!” she exclaimed, “I hate it!  You know that sick fear that gets you when you try to picture eternity to yourself?  That’s the way this barrenness and awful distance affects me.  I hate it!”

“But you won’t hate it!” cried Cartwell.  “You must let me show you its bigness.  It’s as healing as the hand of God.”

Rhoda shuddered.

“Don’t talk about it, please!  I’ll try to think of something else.”

They drove in silence for some moments.  Rhoda, her thin hands clasped in her lap, resolutely stared at the young Indian’s profile.  In the unreal world in which she drifted, she needed some thought of strength, some hope beyond her own, to which to cling.  She was lonely—­lonely as some outcast watching with sick eyes the joy of the world to which he is denied.  As she stared at the stern young profile beside her, into her heart crept the now familiar thrill.

Suddenly Cartwell turned and looked at her quizzically.

“Well, what are your conclusions?”

Rhoda shook her head.

“I don’t know, except that it’s hard to realize that you are an Indian.”

Cartwell’s voice was ironical.

“The only good Indian is a dead Indian, you know.  I’m liable to break loose any time, believe me!”

Rhoda’s eyes were on the far lavender line where the mesa melted into the mountains.

“Yes, and then what?” she asked.

Cartwell’s eyes narrowed, but Rhoda did not see.

“Then I’m liable to follow Indian tradition and take whatever I want, by whatever means!”

“My!  My!” said Rhoda, “that sounds bludgy!  And what are you liable to want?”

“Oh, I want the same thing that a great many white men want.  I’m going to have it myself, though!” His handsome face glowed curiously as he looked at Rhoda.

But the girl was giving his words small heed.  Her eyes still were turned toward the desert, as though she had forgotten her companion.  Sand whirls crossed the distant levels, ceaselessly.  Huge and menacing, they swirled out from the mesa’s edge, crossed the desert triumphantly, then, at contact with rock or cholla thicket, collapsed and disappeared.  Endless, merciless, hopeless the yellow desert quivered against the bronze blue sky.  For the first time dazed hopelessness gave way in Rhoda to fear.  The young Indian, watching the girl’s face, beheld in it what even DeWitt never had seen there—­beheld deadly fear.  He was silent for a moment, then he leaned toward her and put a strong brown hand over her trembling little fists.  His voice was deep and soft.

“Don’t,” he said, “don’t!”

Perhaps it was the subtle, not-to-be-fathomed influence of the desert which fights all sham; perhaps it was that Rhoda merely had reached the limit of her heroic self-containment and that, had DeWitt or Newman been with her, she would have given way in the same manner; perhaps it was that the young Indian’s presence had in it a quality that roused new life in her.  Whatever the cause; the listless melancholy suddenly left Rhoda’s gray eyes and they were wild and black with fear.