“You who have been served and demanded service all your life, why do you do this?”

Rhoda answered slowly.

“I’m not serving you.  I’m trying to pay up some of the debt of my life.”

Kut-le was about in a day or so and by the end of the week he was quite himself.  He resumed the daily expeditions with Rhoda and Alchise which provided text for the girl’s desert learning.  Rhoda’s old despondency, her old agony of prayer for immediate rescue had given way to a strange conflict of desires.  She was eager for rescue, was conscious of a constant aching desire for her own people, and yet the old sense of outrage, of grief, of hopelessness was gone.

Of a sudden she found herself pausing, thrusting back the problems that confronted her while she drank to the full this strange mad joy of life which she felt must leave her when she left the desert.  She knew only that the fear of death was gone.  That hours of fever and pain were no more.  That her mind had found its old poise but with an utterly new view-point of life.  Her blood ran red.  Her lungs breathed deep.  Her eyes saw distances too big for their conception, beauties so deep that her spirit had to expand to absorb them.

The silent nights of stars, the laborious crests that tossed sudden and unspeakable views before the eyes, the eternal canons that led beneath ranges of surpassing majesty, roused in her a passion of delight that could find expression only in her growing physical prowess.  She lived and ate like a splendid boy.  Day after day she scaled the ranges with Kut-le and Alchise; tenderly reared creature of an ultracivilization as she was, she learned the intricate lore of the aborigines, learned what students of the dying people would give their hearts to know.

Kut-le wakened Rhoda at dawn one day.  She prepared the breakfast of coffee, bacon and tortilla.  Alchise shared this eagerly with Rhoda and Kut-le, though already he had eaten with the squaws.  The day was still gray when the three set out on a long day’s trip in search of game.  The way this morning led up a canon deep and quiet, with the night shadows still dark and cool within it.  The air was that of a northern day of June.

Rhoda tramped bravely, up and up, from cactus to bear grass, from bear grass to stunted cedar, from cedar to pines that at last rose triumphant at the crest of a great ridge.  Here Rhoda and Kut-le flung themselves to the ground to rest while Alchise prowled about restlessly.  Across a hundred miles of desert rose faint snow-capped peaks.

Kut-le watched Rhoda’s rapt face for a time.  Then, as if unable to keep back the words, he said softly: 

“Rhoda!  Stay here, always!  Marry me and stay here always!”

Rhoda looked at the beautiful pleading eyes.  She stirred restlessly; but before she could frame an answer Alchise appeared, followed by a lean old Indian all but toothless who wore a pair of tattered overalls and a gauze shirt.  The two Indians stopped before Kut-le, and Alchise jerked a thumb at the stranger.