he turned to come back, with fifty paces between them, she smiled at him and he waved his hand at her.  He asked her a great many questions while he prepared their dinner.  The Nest, he learned, was a free-trading place, and Hauck was its proprietor.  He was surprised when he learned that he was not on Firepan Creek after all.  The Firepan was over the range, and there were a good many Indians to the north and west of it.  Miners came down frequently from the Taku River country and the edge of the Yukon, she said.  At least she thought they were miners, for that is what Hauck used to tell Nisikoos, her aunt.  They came after whisky.  Always whisky.  And the Indians came for liquor, too.  It was the chief article that Hauck, her uncle, traded in.  He brought it from the coast, in the winter time—­many sledge loads of it; and some of those “miners” who came down from the north carried away much of it.  If it was summer they would take it away on pack horses.  What would they do with so much liquor, she wondered?  A little of it made such a beast of Hauck, and a beast of Brokaw, and it drove the Indians wild.  Hauck would no longer allow the Indians to drink it at the Nest.  They had to take it away with them—­into the mountains.  Just now there was quite a number of the “miners” down from the north, ten or twelve of them.  She had not been afraid when Nisikoos, her aunt, was alive.  But now there was no other woman at the Nest, except an old Indian woman who did Hauck’s cooking.  Hauck wanted no one there.  And she was afraid of those men.  They all feared Hauck, and she knew that Hauck was afraid of Brokaw.  She didn’t know why, but he was.  And she was afraid of them all, and hated them all.  She had been quite happy when Nisikoos was alive.  Nisikoos had taught her to read out of books, had taught her things ever since she could remember.  She could write almost as well as Nisikoos.  She said this a bit proudly.  But since her aunt had gone, things were terribly changed.  Especially the men.  They had made her more afraid, every day.

“None of them is like you,” she said with startling frankness, her eyes shining at him.  “I would love to be with you!”

He turned, then, to look at Tara dozing in the sun.

CHAPTER XIX

They ate, facing each other, on a clean, flat stone that was like a table.  There was no hesitation on the girl’s part, no false pride in the concealment of her hunger.  To David it was a joy to watch her eat, and to catch the changing expressions in her eyes, and the little half-smiles that took the place of words as he helped her diligently to bacon and bannock and potatoes and coffee.  The bright glow went only once out of her eyes, and that was when she looked at Tara and Baree.

“Tara has been eating roots all day,” she said, “But what will he eat?” and she nodded at the dog.

“He had a whistler for breakfast,” David assured her.  “Fat as butter.  He wouldn’t eat now anyway.  He is too much interested in the bear.”  She had finished, with a little sigh of content, when he asked:  “What do you mean when you say that you have trained Tara to kill?  Why have you trained him?”