feared.  She was returning not only fearlessly but with a certain defiant satisfaction.  He could fancy her saying to Hauck, and the Red Brute:  “I’ve come back.  Now touch me if you dare!” What would he have to do to live up to that surety of her confidence in him?  A great deal, undoubtedly.  And if he won for her, as she fully expected him to win, what would he do with her?  Take her to the coast—­put her into a school somewhere down south?  That was his first notion.  For to him she looked more than ever like a child as she lay asleep on her bed of balsams.

He tried to picture Brokaw.  He tried to see Hauck in his mental vision, and he thought over again all that the girl had told him about herself and these men.  As he looked at her now—­a little, softly breathing thing under his gray blanket—­it was hard for him to believe anything so horrible as she had suggested.  Perhaps her fears had been grossly exaggerated.  The exchange of gold between Hauck and the Red Brute had probably been for something else.  Even men engulfed in the brutality of the trade they were in would not think of such an appalling crime.  And then—­with a fierceness that made his blood boil—­came the thought of that time when Brokaw had caught her in his arms, and had held her head back until it hurt—­and had kissed her!  Baree had crept between his knees, and David’s fingers closed so tightly in the loose skin of his neck that the dog whined.  He rose to his feet and stood gazing down at the girl.  He stood there for a long time without moving or making a sound.

“A little woman,” he whispered to himself at last.  “Not a child.”

From that moment his blood was hot with a desire to reach the Nest.  He had never thought seriously of physical struggle with men except in the way of sport.  His disposition had always been to regard such a thing as barbarous, and he had never taken advantage of his skill with the gloves as the average man might very probably have done.  To fight was to lower one’s self-respect enormously, he thought.  It was not a matter of timidity, but of very strong conviction—­an entrenchment that had saved him from wreaking vengeance—­in the hour when another man would have killed.  But there, in that room in his home, he had stood face to face with a black, revolting sin.  There had been nothing left to shield, nothing to protect.  Here it was different.  A soul had given itself into his protection, a soul as pure as the stars shining over the mountain tops, and its little keeper lay there under his eyes sleeping in the sweet faith that it was safe with him.  A little later his fingers tingled with an odd thrill as he took his automatic out of his pack, loaded it carefully, and placed it in his pocket where it could be easily reached.  The act was a declaration of something ultimately definite.  He stretched himself out near the fire and went to sleep with the force of this declaration brewing strangely within him.