Instantly there was the click of a rifle and Alchise shouted: 

“Stop!”

“Confound it!” growled the man, rising to full view, “why didn’t you swallow it!”

“I couldn’t!” replied Rhoda indignantly.  “You don’t suppose I wanted to!”

She turned toward the camp.  Alchise was standing stolidly covering them with his rifle.  Kut-le was walking coolly toward them, while the squaws sat gaping.

“Well!” exclaimed Kut-le.  “What can we do for you, Jim?”

The stranger, a rough tramp-like fellow in tattered overalls, wiped his face, on which was a week’s stubble.

“I’d always thought you was about white, Cartwell,” he said, “but I see you’re no better than the rest of them.  What are you going to do with me?”

Kut-le eyed his unbidden guest speculatively.

“Well, we’ll have something to eat first.  I don’t like to think on an empty stomach.  Come over to my blanket and sit down, Jim.”

Ignoring Rhoda, who was watching him closely, Kut-le seated himself on his blanket beside Jim and offered him a cigarette, which was refused.

“I don’t want no favors from you, Cartwell.”  His voice was surly.  There was something more than his rough appearance that Rhoda disliked about the man but she didn’t know just what it was.  Kut-le’s eyes narrowed, but he lighted his own cigarette without replying.  “You’re up to a rotten trick and you know it, Cartwell,” went on Jim.  “You take my advice and let me take the girl back to her friends and you make tracks down into Mexico as fast as the Lord’ll let you.”

Kut-le shifted the Navajo that hung over his naked shoulders.  He gave a short laugh that Rhoda had never heard from him before.

“Let her go with you, Jim Provenso!  You know as well as I do that she is safer with an Apache!  Anything else?”

“Yes, this else!” Jim’s voice rose angrily.  “If ever we get a chance at you, we’ll hang you sky high, see?  This may go with Injuns but not with whites, you dirty pup!”

Suddenly Kut-le rose and, dropping his blanket, stood before the white man in his bronze perfection.

“Provenso, you aren’t fit to look at a decent woman!  Don’t put on dog just because you belong to the white race.  You’re disreputable, and you know it.  Don’t speak to Miss Tuttle again; you are too rotten!”

The prospector had risen and stood glaring at Kut-le.

“I’ll kill you for that yet, you dirty Injun!” he shouted.

“Shucks!” sniffed the Indian.  “You haven’t the nerve to injure anything but a woman!”

Jim’s face went purple.

“For two bits I’d knock your block off, right now.”

“There isn’t a cent in the camp.”  Kut-le turned to Rhoda.  “You get the point of the conversation, I hope?”

Rhoda’s eyes were blazing.  She had gotten the point, and yet—­Jim was a white man!  Anything white was better than an Indian.