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She looked at the watch Five hours till dawn She would let John have the whole of that time in which to sleep His ten minutes would be worse than useless, while to find the camp after the moon had set would be quite out of the question Her own eyes ide and sleepless She sat in the sand beside DeWitt until driven by the cold to pace back and forth John slept without stirring; the sleep of complete exhaustion Rhoda was not afraid, nor did she feel lonely The desert was hers now There was no wind, but now and again the cactus rustled as if unseen wings had brushed it The dried heaps of cholla stirred as if unseen paws had pressed thehter of coyotes on their night hunts But still Rhoda was not afraid

At first, in the confusion of thoughts that the day's events had crowded on her, her clearest sense was of thankfulness Then she fell to wondering what had happened to Porter and Kut-le Suddenly she caught her breath with a shiver If Porter won there could be but one answer as to Kut-le's fate John's attitude of ether

"I will not have him killed!" she whispered "No! No! I will not have him killed!"

Forwith her fears Then she suddenly recalled the fact that vengeance was to be saved for John This uncanny thought coe John

And then in the utter silence of the desert night, staring at the sinking moon, Rhoda asked herself hen she should have been hts to Kut-le's plight! For a ht 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 inity of his remarkable physical perfection She kne that fro appeal to her She kne that all his unusual characteristics that at first had seee to her were the ones that had drawn her to hie, his brutal incisiveness, all had fascinated her All her days with hier, then the weeks on the ledge, and the day when she had found the desert, and finally the day just past, to the very e