“I can’t marry unless I’m well,” insisted Rhoda, “and I never shall be well again.  I know that you all thought it was for the best, bringing me down to the desert, but just as soon as I can manage it without hurting Katherine’s and Jack’s feelings too much, I’m going back to New York.  If you only knew how the big emptiness of this desert country adds to my depression!”

“If you go back to New York,” persisted DeWitt, “you are going back as my wife.  I’m sick of seeing you dependent on hired care.  Why, Rhoda dear, is it nothing to you that, when you haven’t a near relative in the world, I would gladly die for you?”

“Oh!” cried the girl, tears of weakness and pity in her eyes, “you know that it means everything to me!  But I can’t marry any one.  All I want is just to crawl away and die in peace.  I wish that that Indian hadn’t come upon me so promptly.  I’d just have gone to sleep and never wakened.”

“Don’t!  Don’t!” cried DeWitt.  “I shall pick you up and hold you against all the world, if you say that!”

“Hush!” whispered Rhoda, but her smile was very tender.  “Some one is coming through the orchard.”

DeWitt reluctantly released the slender hands and leaned back in his chair.  The sun had crossed the peach orchard slowly, breathlessly.  It cast long, slanting shadows along the beautiful alfalfa fields and turned the willows by the irrigating ditch to a rosy gray.  As the sun sank, song-birds piped and lizards scuttled along the porch rail.  The loveliest part of the New Mexican day had come.

The two young Northerners watched the man who was swinging through the orchard.  It was Cartwell.  Despite his breadth of shoulder, the young Indian looked slender, though it was evident that only panther strength could produce such panther grace.  He crossed the lawn and stood at the foot of the steps; one hand crushed his soft hat against his hip, and the sun turned his close-cropped black hair to blue bronze.  For an instant none of the three spoke.  It was as if each felt the import of this meeting which was to be continued through such strange vicissitudes.  Cartwell, however, was not looking at DeWitt but at Rhoda, and she returned his gaze, surprised at the beauty of his face, with its large, long-lashed, Mohave eyes that were set well apart and set deeply as are the eyes of those whose ancestors have lived much in the open glare of the sun; with the straight, thin-nostriled nose; with the stern, cleanly modeled mouth and the square chin, below.  And looking into the young Indian’s deep black eyes, Rhoda felt within herself a vague stirring that for a second wiped the languor from her eyes.

Cartwell spoke first, easily, in the quiet, well-modulated voice of the Indian.

“Hello!  All safe, I see!  Mr. Newman will be here shortly.”  He seated himself on the upper step with his back against a pillar and fanned himself with his hat.  “Jack’s working too hard.  I want him to go to the coast for a while and let me run the ditch.  But he won’t.  He’s as pig-headed as a Mohave.”