For many minutes she paced back and forth, battling with her fears.  Then she suddenly recalled the fact that vengeance was to be saved for John.  This uncanny thought comforted her.  She had little fear but that she could manage John.

And then in the utter silence of the desert night, staring at the sinking moon, Rhoda asked herself why, when she should have been mad with joy over her own rescue, she was giving all her thoughts to Kut-le’s plight!  For a moment the question brought a flood of confusion.  Then, standing alone in the night beauty of the desert, the girl acknowledged the truth that she had denied even to herself so long.  The young Indian’s image returned to her endowed with all the dignity of his remarkable physical perfection.  She knew now that from the first this physical beauty of his had had a strong appeal to her.  She knew now that all his unusual characteristics that at first had seemed so strange to her were the ones that had drawn her to him.  His strange mental honesty, his courage, his brutal incisiveness, all had fascinated her.  All her days with him returned to her, days of weakness, of anger, then the weeks on the ledge, and the day when she had found the desert, and finally the day just past, to the very moment when Billy Porter had come upon them on the ledge.

Rhoda stood with unseeing eyes while before her inward vision passed a magnificent panorama of the glories through which Kut-le had led her.  Chaos of mountain and desert, resplendent with color; cool, sweet depth of canon; burning height of tortured peak; slope of pungent pinon forest—­all wrapped in the haze which is the desert’s own.

Rhoda knew the truth; knew that she loved Kut-le!  She knew that she loved him with all the passionate devotion for which her rebirth had given her the capacity.

With this acknowledgment, all her calm was swept away.  With fingers clasped against her breast, with wide eyes on the brooding night, she wished that she might tell him this that had come to her.  If only once more the inscrutable tenderness of his black eyes were upon her!  If the deep imperative voice were but sounding in her ears again!  If only she could feel now the touch of his powerful arms as he carried her the long sick miles to Chira.  Trembling with longing, her gaze fell upon the man sleeping at her feet.  She drew a sudden troubled breath.  Must she renounce this new rapture of living?  Must she?

“Have I found new life in the desert only to lose it?” she whispered.  “O Kut-le!  Kut-le!”

DeWitt slept on, unmoving, and Rhoda watched him with tragedy-stricken eyes.

“What shall I do!” she whispered, lips quivering, shaking hands twisting together.  “Oh, what shall I do!”

She tried to picture a future with Kut-le.  She saw his tenderness, his purposefulness, the bigness of his mind and spirit.  Then with a cold clutch at her throat came the thought of race barrier, and in a moment Rhoda was plunged into the oldest, the most hopeless, the least solvable of all love’s problems.  Minute after minute went by and the girl, standing by the sleeping man, fought a fight that shook her slender body and racked her soul.  At last she raised her face to the sky.