So far Jack Newman had said nothing. Rhoda looked at him as if he were her last hope.
"Oh, Jack!" she cried. "He was your friend, your dearest friend! And he sent me back! Why, you never would have got me if he hadn't voluntarily let me go! He is wonderful on the trail!"
"So we found!" said DeWitt grimly.
But Rhoda was watching Jack.
"Rhoda," Jack said at last, "I know how you feel. I know what a bully chap Kut-le is. This just about does me up. But what he's done can't be let go. We've got to punish him!"
"'Punish him!'" repeated Rhoda. "Just what do you mean by that?"
"We mean," answered DeWitt, "that when we find him, I'll shoot him!"
"No!" cried Rhoda. "No! Why he sent me back!"
The three men looked at Rhoda uncomfortably and at each other wonderingly. A woman's magnanimity is never to be understood by a man!
"Are you tired, Rhoda?" asked DeWitt abruptly. "Do you feel able to take to the saddle at once?"
"I'm all right!" exclaimed Rhoda impatiently. "What are your plans?"
DeWitt pointed out across the sand to the cañon wall. A line of slender footprints led through the level wastes as plainly as if on new-fallen snow.
"We will follow your trail," he said.
There was silence for an instant in the little camp while the men eyed the girlish face, flushed and vivid beneath the tan. As it had come when DeWitt had rescued her, the old sense of the appalling nature of her experience was returning to her again. With sickening clarity she was getting the men's view-point. The old Rhoda would have protested, would have fought desperately and blindly. The new Rhoda had lived through hours of hopeless battle with circumstance. She had learned the desert's lesson of patience.
"I have thought," she said slowly, "so much of the joy of my return to you! God only knows how the picture of it has kept me alive from day to day. All your joy seems swallowed up in your thirst for revenge. All right, my friends. Only, wherever you go, I go too!"
Billy Porter shook his head with a muttered "Gosh!" as if the ways of women were quite beyond him.
"I think you had better ride on to the ranch with Carlos," said DeWitt, "while we take up Kut-le's trail. This will be no trip for a woman."
"You're foolish!" exclaimed Jack. "We'll not let her out of our sight again. You can't tell what stunt Kut-le is up to!"
"That's right!" said Porter. "It'll be hard on her, but she'd better come with us."