THE TURN IN THE TRAIL
The little group, trudging the long difficult trail along the mountain
was a rich study in degrees: Rhoda, the fragile Caucasian, a product of
centuries of civilization; and Kut-le, the Indian, with the keenness,
the ferocious courage, the cunning of the Indian leavened inextricably
with the thousand softening influences of a score of years' contact
with civilization; then Cesca, the lean and stoical product of an
ancient and terrible savagery; and Alchise, her mate. Finally
Molly--squat, dirty Molly--the stupid, squalid aborigine, as distinct
from Cesca's type as is the brown snail from the stinging wasp.
Alchise, striding after his chief, was smitten with a sudden idea.
After ruminating on it for some time, he communicated it to his squaw.
Cesca shook her head with a grunt of disapproval. Alchise insisted and
the squaw looked at Kut-le cunningly.
"_Quién sabe_?" she said at last.
At this Alchise hurried forward and touched Kut-le on the shoulder.
"Take 'em squaw to Reservation. Medicine dance. Squaw heap sick.
_Sabe_?"
"Reservation's too far away," replied Kut-le, shifting Rhoda's head to
lie more easily on his arm. "I'm making for Chira."
Alchise shook his head vigorously.
"Too many mens! We go Reservation. Alchise help carry sick squaw."
"Nope! You're way off, Alchise. I'm going where I can get some white
man's medicine the quickest. I'm not so afraid of getting caught as I
am of her getting a bad run of fever. I have friends at Chira."
Alchise fell back, muttering disappointment. White man's medicine was
no good. He cared little about Rhoda but he adored Kut-le. It was
necessary therefore that the white squaw be saved, since his chief
evidently was quite mad about her. All the rest of the day Alchise was
very thoughtful. Late at night the next halt was made. High up in the
mountain on a sheltered ledge Kut-le laid down his burden.
"Keep her quiet till I get back," he said, and disappeared.
Rhoda was in a stupor and lay quietly unconscious with the stars
blinking down on her, a limp dark heap against the mountain wall. The
three Indians munched mule meat, then Molly curled herself on the
ground and in three minutes was snoring. Alchise stood erect and still
on the ledge for perhaps ten minutes after Kut-le's departure. Then he
touched Cesca on the shoulder, lifted Rhoda in his arms and, followed
by Cesca, left the sleeping Molly alone on the ledge.
Swiftly, silently, Alchise strode up the mountainside, Rhoda making
neither sound nor motion. For hours, with wonderful endurance the two
Indians held the pace. They moved up the mountain to the summit, which
they crossed, then dropped rapidly downward. Just at dawn Alchise
stopped at a gray _campos_ under some pines and called. A voice from
the hut answered him. The canvas flap was put back and an old Indian
buck appeared, followed by several squaws and young bucks, yawning and
staring.
Alchise laid Rhoda on the ground while he spoke rapidly to the Indian.
The old man protested at first but on the repeated use of Kut-le's name
he finally nodded and Alchise carried Rhoda into the _campos_. A squaw
kindled a fire which, blazing up brightly, showed a huge, dark room,
canvas-roofed and dirt-floored, quite bare except for the soiled
blankets on the floor.
Rhoda was laid in the center of the hut. The old buck knelt beside
her. He was very old indeed. His time-ravaged features were lean and
ascetic. His clay-matted hair was streaked with white; his black eyes
were deep-sunk and his temples were hollow. But there was a fine sort
of dignity about the old medicine-man, despite his squalor. He gazed
on Rhoda in silence for some time. Alchise and Cesca sat on the floor,
and little by little they were joined by a dozen other Indians who
formed a circle about the girl. The firelight flickered on the dark,
intent faces and on Rhoda's delicate beauty as she lay passing rapidly
from stupor to delirium.
Suddenly the old man raised his lean hand, shaking a gourd filled with
pebbles, and began softly to chant. Instantly the other Indians joined
him and the _campos_ was filled with the rhythm of a weird song. Rhoda
tossed her arms and began to cough a little from the smoke. The chant
quickened. It was but the mechanical repetition of two notes falling
always from high to low. Yet it had an indescribable effect of
melancholy, this aboriginal song. It was as hopeless and melancholy as
all of nature's chants: the wail of the wind, the sob of the rain, the
beat of the waves.
Rhoda sat erect, her eyes wild and wide. The old buck, without ceasing
his song, attempted to thrust her back with one lean brown claw, but
Rhoda struck him feebly.
"Go away!" she cried. "Be quiet! You hurt my head! Don't make that
dreadful noise!"
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.
During this time the Indians sat silent and watchful. Kut-le turned to
Alchise.
"You cursed fool!" he said.
"She get well now," replied Alchise anxiously. "Alchise save her for
you. Molly tell you where come."
For a moment Kut-le stared at Alchise; then, as if realizing the
futility of speech, "Come!" he said, and ignoring the other Indians, he
strode from the _campos_. Alchise and Cesca followed him, and outside
the anxious Molly seized Rhoda's limp hand with a little cry of joy.
Kut-le led the way to a quiet spot among the pines. Here he laid Rhoda
on a sheepskin and covered her with a tattered blanket, the spoils of
his previous night's trip.
About the middle of the morning Rhoda opened her eyes. As she stirred,
Kut-le came to her.
"I've had such horrible dreams, Kut-le. You won't go and leave me to
the Indians again?"
This appeal from Rhoda in her weakness almost overcame Kut-le but he
only smoothed her tangled hair and answered:
"No, dear one!"
"Where are we now?" she asked feebly.
Kut-le smiled.
"In the Rockies."
"I think I am very sick," continued Rhoda. "Do you think we can stay
quiet in one place today?"
Kut-le shook his head.
"I am going to get you to some quinine as quick as I can. There is
some about twenty-four hours from here."
Rhoda's eyes widened.
"Shall I be with white people?"
"Don't bother. You'll have good care."
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.
"The day that I left my home for the rolling sea,
I said, 'Mother dear, O pray to thy God for me!'
But e'er we set sail I went a fond leave to take--"
Over and over she sang the three lines, ending each time with a
frightened stare up into Kut-le's face.
"Whom did I say good-by to? Whom? But they don't care!"
Then again the tired voice:
"The day that I left my home for the rolling sea--"
Night came and the weary, weary crossing of a craggy, heavily wooded
mountain. Kut-le did not relinquish his burden. He seemed not to tire
of the weight of the slender body that lay now in helpless stupor. If
the squaws or Alchise felt fatigue or impatience as Kut-le held them to
a pace on the tortuous trail that would nearly have exhausted a
Caucasian athlete, they gave no sign. All the endless night Kut-le led
the way under the midnight blackness of the piñon or the violet light
of the stars, until the lifting light of the dawn found them across the
ranges and standing at the edge of a little river.
In the dim light there lifted a terraced adobe building with ladders
faintly outlined on the terraces. There was no sound save the barking
of a dog and the ripple of the river. With a muttered admonition,
Kut-le left Rhoda to the others and climbed one of the ladders. He
returned with a blanketed figure that gazed on Rhoda non-committally.
At a sign, Kut-le lifted Rhoda, and the little group moved noiselessly
toward the dwelling, clambered up a ladder, and disappeared.
Rhoda opened her eyes with a sense of physical comfort that confused
her. She was lying on the floor of a long, gray-walled room. In one
corner was a tiny adobe fire-place from which a tinier fire threw a jet
of flame color on the Navajo that lay before the hearth. Along the
walls were benches with splendid Navajos rolled cushion-wise upon them.
Above the benches hung several rifles with cougarskin quivers beneath
them. A couple of cheap framed mirrors were hung with silver necklaces
of beautiful workmanship. In a corner a table was set with heavy but
shining china dishes.
Rhoda stared with increasing wonder. She was very weak and spent but
her head was clear. She lifted her arms and looked at them. She was
wearing a loose-fitting gray garment of a strange weave. She fingered
it, more and more puzzled.
"You wake now?" asked a low voice.
Coming softly down the room was an Indian woman of comely face and
strange garb. Over a soft shirt of cut and weave such as Rhoda had on,
she wore a dark overdress caught at one shoulder and reaching only to
the knees. A many-colored girdle confined the dress at the waist. Her
legs and feet were covered with high, loose moccasins. Her black hair
hung free on her shoulders.
"You been much sick," the woman went on, "much sick," stooping to
straighten Rhoda's blanket.
"Where am I?" asked Rhoda.
"At Chira. You eat breakfast?"
Rhoda caught the woman's hand.
"Who are you?" she asked. "You have been very good to me."
"Me Marie," replied the woman.
"Where are Kut-le and the others?"
"Kut-le here. Others in mountain. You much sick, three days."
Rhoda sighed. Would this kaleidoscope of misery never end!
"I am very tired of it all," she said. "I think it would have been
kinder if you had let me die. Will you help me to get back to my white
friends?"
Marie shook her head.
"Kut-le friend. We take care Kut-le's squaw."
Rhoda turned wearily on her side.
"Go away and let me sleep," she said.