rose before him just then, not twenty paces away.  She had emerged like an apparition from behind a great boulder—­a little older, a little taller, a bit wilder than she had seemed to him in the picture, but with that same glorious hair sweeping about her, and that same questioning look in her eyes as she stared at him.  Her hands were in that same way at her side, too, as if she were on the point of running away from him.  He tried to speak.  He believed, afterward, that he even made an effort to hold out his arms.  But he was powerless.  And so they stood there, twenty paces apart, staring as if they had met from the ends of the earth.

Something happened then to whip David’s reason back into its place.  He heard a crunching—­heavy, slow.  From around the other end of the boulder came a huge bear.  A monster.  Ten feet from the girl.  The first cry rushed out of his throat.  It was a warning, and in the same instant he raised his rifle to his shoulder.  The girl was quicker than he—­like an arrow, a flash, a whirlwind of burnished tresses, as she flew to the side of the great beast.  She stood with her back against it, her two hands clutching its tawny hair, her slim body quivering, her eyes flashing at David.  He felt weak.  He lowered his rifle and advanced a few steps.

“Who ... what ...” he managed to say; and stopped.  He was powerless to go on.  But she seemed to understand.  Her body stiffened.

“I am Marge O’Doone,” she said defiantly, “and this is my bear!”

CHAPTER XVII

She was splendid as she stood there, an exquisite human touch in the savageness of the world about her—­and yet strangely wild as she faced David, protecting with her own quivering body the great beast behind her.  To David, in the first immensity of his astonishment, she had seemed to be a woman; but now she looked to him like a child, a very young girl.  Perhaps it was the way her hair fell in a tangled riot of curling tresses over her shoulders and breast; the slimness of her; the shortness of her skirt; the unfaltering clearness of the great, blue eyes that were staring at him; and, above all else, the manner in which she had spoken her name.  The bear might have been nothing more than a rock to him now, against which she was leaning.  He did not hear Baree’s low growling.  He had travelled a long way to find her, and now that she stood there before him in flesh and blood he was not interested in much else.  It was a rather difficult situation.  He had known her so long, she had been with him so constantly, filling even his dreams, that it was difficult for him to find words in which to begin speech.  When they did come they were most commonplace; his voice was quiet, with an assured and protecting note in it.

“My name is David Raine,” he said.  “I have come a great distance to find you.”

It was a simple and unemotional statement of fact, with nothing that was alarming in it, and yet the girl shrank closer against her bear.  The huge brute was standing without the movement of a muscle, his small reddish eyes fixed on David.