The chant quickened.  The medicine-man now rocked back and forth on his knees, accenting the throb of the song by beating his bare feet on the earth.  He seemed by some strange suppleness to flatten his instep paddle-wise and to bring the entire leg from toe to knee at one blow against the ground.  Never did his glowing old eyes leave Rhoda’s face.

The girl, thrown into misery and excitement by the insistence of the chant, began to wring her hands.  The words said nothing to her but the rhythmic repetition of the notes told her a story as old as life itself:  that life passes swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and without hope; that our days are as grass and as the clouds that are consumed and are no more; that the soul sinks to the land of darkness and of the shadow of death.  Rhoda struggled, with horror in her eyes, to rise; but the old man with a hand on her shoulder forced her back on the blanket.

“Oh, what is it!” wailed Rhoda, clutching at the mass of yellow-brown hair about her face.  “Where am I?  What are you doing?  Have I died?  Where is Kut-le?  Kut-le!” she screamed.  “Kut-le!”

The medicine-man held her to the blanket and for a time she sat quiescent.  Then as the Indian lifted his hand from her shoulder the bewilderment of her gray eyes changed to the wildness of delirium.  She looked toward the doorway where the dawn light made but little headway against the dark interior.  With one blue-veined hand on her panting breast she slowly, stealthily gathered herself together, and with unbelievable swiftness she sprang for the square of dawn light.  She leaped almost into the arms of a young buck who sat near the door.  He bore her back to her place while the chant continued without interruption.

Exhausted, Rhoda lay listening to the song.  Gradually it began to exert its hypnotic influence over her.  Its sense of melancholy enveloped her drug-like.  She lay prone, the tears coursing down her cheeks, her twitching hands turned upward beside her.  Slowly she floated outward upon a dark sea whose waves beat a ceaseless requiem of anguish on her ears.  It seemed to her that she was enduring all the sorrows of the ages; that she was brain-tortured by the death agonies of all humanity; that all the uselessness, all the meaninglessness, all the utter weariness of the death-ridden world pressed upon her, suffocating her, forcing her to stillness, slowing the beating of her heart, the intake of her breath.  Slowly her white lids closed, yet with one last conscious cry for life: 

“Kut-le!” she wailed.  “Kut-le!”

A quick shadow filled the doorway.

“Here, Rhoda!  Here!”

Kut-le bounded into the room, upsetting the medicine-man, and lifted Rhoda in his arms.  She clung to him wildly.

“Take me away, Kut-le!  Take me away!”

He soothed her with great tenderness.

“Dear one!” he murmured.  “Dear one!” and she closed her eyes quietly.