“I fastened our bundle on Tara’s back and we lost it in the night coming up over the mountain,” she said.  “It was so steep that in places I had to catch hold of Tara and let him drag me up.”

In another moment he was at his pack, opening it, and tossing things to right and left on the white sand, and the girl watched him, her eyes very bright with anticipation.

“Coffee, bacon, bannock, and potatoes,” he said, making a quick inventory of his small stock of provisions.

“Potatoes!” cried the girl.

“Yes—­dehydrated.  See?  It looks like rice.  One pound of this equals fourteen pounds of potatoes.  And you can’t tell the difference when it’s cooked right.  Now for a fire!”

She was darting this way and that, collecting small dry sticks in the sand before he was on his feet.  He could not resist standing for a moment and watching her.  Her movements, even in her quick and eager quest of fuel, were the most graceful he had ever seen in a human being.  And yet she was tired!  She was hungry!  And he believed that her feet, concealed in those rock-torn moccasins, were bruised and sore.  He went down to the stream for water, and in the few moments that he was gone his mind worked swiftly.  He believed that he understood, perhaps even more than the girl herself.  There was something about her that was so sweetly childish—­in spite of her age and her height and her amazing prettiness that was not all a child’s prettiness—­that he could not feel that she had realized fully the peril from which she was fleeing when he found her.  He had guessed that her dread was only partly for herself and that the other part was for Tara, her bear.  She had asked him in a sort of plaintive anxiety and with rather more of wonderment and perplexity in her eyes than fear, whether she belonged to Brokaw, and what it all meant, and whether a man could buy a girl.  It was not a mystery to him that the “red brute” she had told him about should want her.  His puzzlement was that such a thing could happen, if he had guessed right, among men.  Buy her?  Of course down there in the big cities such a thing had happened hundreds and thousands of times—­were happening every day—­but he could not easily picture it happening up here, where men lived because of their strength.  There must surely be other men at the Nest than the two hated and feared by the girl—­Hauck, her uncle, and Brokaw, the “red brute.”

She had built a little pile of sticks and dry moss ready for the touch of a match when he returned.  Tara had stretched himself out lazily in the sun and Baree was still between the two rocks, eyeing him watchfully.  Before David lighted the fire he spread his one blanket out on the sand and made the Girl sit down.  She was close to him, and her eyes did not leave his face for an instant.  Whenever he looked up she was gazing straight at him, and when he went down to the creek for another pail of water he felt that her eyes were still on him.  When