The light faded from Rhoda's eyes.
"It's hard for me, isn't it?" she said, as if appealing to the college man of the ranch.
"Rhoda! Rhoda!" whispered Kut-le, "your suffering kills me! But I must have you, I must!"
Rhoda moved her head impatiently, as if the Indian's tense, handsome face annoyed her. She refused food but drank deeply of the tepid water and shortly they were again on the trail.
For several hours Rhoda lay in Kut-le's arms, weak and ill but with lucid mind. They were making their way up a long cañon. It was very narrow. Rhoda could see the individual leaves of the aspens on the opposite wall as they moved close in the shadow of the other. The floor, watered by a clear brook, was level and green. On either side the walls were murmurous with delicately quivering aspens and sighing pines.
Suddenly Cesca gave a grunt of warning. Far down the valley a sheep-herder was approaching with his flocks. Kut-le turned to the right and Alchise sprang to his aid. In the shelter of the trees, Kut-le twisted a handkerchief across Rhoda's mouth; and in reply to her outraged eyes, he said:
"I don't mind single visitors as a rule but I haven't time to fuss with one now."
Together the two men carried Rhoda up the cañon-side. They lifted her from trunk to trunk, now a root-hold, now a jutting bit of rock, till far up the sheer wall. Rhoda lay at last on a little ledge heaped with pine-needles. By the time the Indians were settled on the rock Rhoda was delirious again. The fever had returned twofold and Molly's entire efforts were toward keeping the tossing form on the ledge.
Slowly, very slowly, the herder, a sturdy ragged Mexican, moved up the cañon, pausing now and again to scratch his head. He was whistling La Paloma. The Indians' black eyes did not leave him and after his flute-like notes had melted into the distance they still crouched in cramped stillness on the ledge.
But shortly Kut-le freed Rhoda's mouth, gave Alchise a swift look, and with infinite care the descent was begun. Kut-le did not like traveling in the daylight, for many reasons. Carefully, swiftly they moved up the cañon, always hugging the wall. Late in the afternoon they emerged on an open mesa. All the wretched day Rhoda had traveled in a fearsome world of her own, peopled with uncanny figures, alight with a glare that seared her eyes, held in a vice that gripped her until she screamed with restless pain. The song that the shepherd had whistled tortured her tired brain.