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"Go back to your own kind and I will go on, alone. Don't stop to talk any more. Go now!" Rhoda turned and looked at Cesca squatting by the horses, at Molly hovering near by with anxious eyes. Never to make the dawn camp, again never to hear Molly humming over the stew-pot! Suddenly Rhoda felt that if she could have Molly with her she would not be so utterly separated from Kut-le.
She was pounding a piece of meat on a flat stone, muttering to herself when a piece fell to the ground. Sometimes she wiped the sand from the fallen bit on her skirt. More often she flung it into the stew-pot unwiped. "Cesca!" cried Rhoda, "do keep the burro out of the meat!" The burro that Kut-le recently had acquired was sniffing at the meat.
Here the little party would seem as secure in their dizzy seclusion as eagles of the Andes. It was barely noon and the mountain air was sweet and exhilarating. Kut-le sat against the rampart, smoking a cigarette, while Molly and Cesca worked over the fire. Rhoda lunched on the tortillas to which Molly had clung through all the vicissitudes of flight. "Where are the horses?" she asked Kut-le.
"Oh, Cesca," cried Rhoda, "I'm too sick to work! And see this meal I've made! Isn't it good?" Cesca glanced disdainfully at the little heap of meal Rhoda had bruised out so painfully. "Huh!" she grunted. "Feed 'em to the horses. Injuns no eat 'em!" Rhoda looked from the meal to her slender, tired fingers. Cesca's contempt hurt her unaccountably. In her weakness her cleft chin quivered.
When Kut-le and Alchise go off on one of their hunts and Cesca goes to sleep, you and I will steal off and hide until night, and you will show me how to get home again. O Molly, I'll be very good to you if you will do this for me! Don't you see how foolish Kut-le is? I can never, never marry him! His ways are not my ways. My ways are not his! Always I will be white and he Indian.
Kut-le and Alchise were not to be seen but Molly nodded beside Rhoda's blankets and the thin hag Cesca was curled in the grass near by, asleep. "You awake? Heap hungry?" asked Molly suddenly. Rhoda sat up, groaning at the torturing stiffness of her muscles. "Where is Kut-le?" she asked. "Gone get 'em supper. Alchise gone too."
With Cesca looking on sardonically, Molly poured fresh seeds on her rude metate and showed Rhoda the grinding roll that flattened and broke the little grains. Despite her weak fingers Rhoda took to the work easily. As she emptied out the first handful of meal, a curious sense of pleasure came to her.
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.
She herself was not at all disturbed by her mishaps but, with a grimace and a chuckle, picked up the food. But Cesca was annoyed. She was tending the fire which by a marvel of skill she kept always clear and all but smokeless. At each of Molly's mishaps, Cesca hurled a stone at her friend's back with a savage "Me-yah!" that disturbed Molly not at all.
Kut-le strolled over to a cat's-claw bush at whose base lay a tangle of dead leaves. With a bit of stick, he scattered this litter, struck the ground several good blows and returned with a string of fat desert mice. With infinite care Cesca kindled a fire so tiny, so clear, that scarcely a wisp of smoke escaped into the quivering air.
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