“I can’t let a human being die like a trapped animal!” she panted, and she threw herself wildly against him.

Kut-le fell at the unexpected impact of her weight and his foot was freed!  He lifted Rhoda, leaped from the track, and the second section of the tourist train thundered into the west.

“You are as fine as I thought you were—­” he began.  But Rhoda was a limp heap at his feet.

The girl came to her senses partially when Kut-le set her in the saddle and fastened her there with strap and blanket.  But happily she was practically unconscious for the hour or two that remained till dawn.  Just as day was breaking the Indians made their way across an arroyo and up a long slope to a group of cottonwoods.  Here Rhoda was put to bed on a heap of blankets.

Sometime in the afternoon she woke with a clear head.  It was the first time in months that she had wakened without a headache.  She stared from the shade of the cottonwoods to the distant lavender haze of the desert.  There was not a sound in all the world.  Mysterious, remote, the desert stared back at her, mocking her little grief.  More terrible to her than her danger in Kut-le’s hands, more appalling than the death threat that had hung over her so long, was this sense of awful space, of barren nothingness with which the desert oppressed her.  Instinctively she turned to look for human companionship.  Kut-le and Alchise were not to be seen but Molly nodded beside Rhoda’s blankets and the thin hag Cesca was curled in the grass near by, asleep.

“You awake?  Heap hungry?” asked Molly suddenly.

Rhoda sat up, groaning at the torturing stiffness of her muscles.

“Where is Kut-le?” she asked.

“Gone get ’em supper.  Alchise gone too.”

“Molly,” Rhoda took the rough brown hand between both her soft cold palms, “Molly, will you help me to run away?”

Molly looked from the clasping fingers up to Rhoda’s sweet face.  Molly was a squaw, dirty and ignorant.  Rhoda was the delicate product of a highly cultivated civilization, egoistic, narrow-viewed, self-centered.  And yet Rhoda, looking into Molly’s deep brown eyes, saw there that limitless patience and fortitude and gentleness which is woman’s without regard to class or color.  And not knowing why, the white girl bowed her head on the squaw’s fat shoulder and sobbed a little.  A strange look came into Molly’s face.  She was childless and had worked fearfully to justify her existence to her tribe.  Few hands had touched hers in tenderness.  Few voices had appealed to her for sympathy.  Suddenly Molly clasped Rhoda in her strong arms and swayed back and forth with her gently.

“You no cry!” she said.  “You no cry, little Sun-head, you no cry!”

“Molly, dear kind Molly, won’t you help me to get back to my own people?  Suppose it was your daughter that a white man had stolen!  O Molly, I want to go home!”