It may have been five minutes that David held the Girl in his arms, staring down into the sunlit valley into which the last two of Hauck’s men had fled, and during that time he did not speak, and he heard only her steady sobbing.  He drew into his lungs deep breaths of the invigorating air, and he felt himself growing stronger as the Girl’s body became heavier in his embrace, and her arms relaxed and slipped down from his shoulders.  He raised her face.  There were no tears in her eyes, but she was still moaning a little, and her lips were quivering like a crying child’s.  He bent his head and kissed them, and she caught her breath pantingly as she looked at him with eyes which were limpid pools of blue out of which her terror was slowly dying away.  She whispered his name.  In her look and in that whisper there was unutterable adoration.  It was for him she had been afraid.  She was looking at him now as one saved to her from the dead, and for a moment he strained her still closer, and as he crushed his face to hers he felt the warm, sweet caress of her lips, and the thrilling pressure of her hands, at his blood-stained cheeks.  A sound from behind made him turn his head, and fifty feet away he saw the big grizzly ambling cumbrously from the cabin.  They could hear him growling as he stood in the sunshine, his head swinging slowly from side to side like a huge pendulum—­in his throat the last echoing of that ferocious rage and hate that had destroyed their enemies.  And in the same moment Baree stood in the doorway, his lips drawn back and his fangs gleaming, as if he expected other enemies to face him.

Quickly David led Marge beyond the boulder from behind which he had opened the fight, and drew her down with him into a soft carpet of grass, thick with the blue of wild violets, with the big rock shutting out the cabin from their vision.

“Rest here, little comrade,” he said, his voice low and trembling with his worship of her, his hands stroking back her wonderful hair.  “I must return to the cabin.  Then—­we will go.”

“Go!”

She repeated the word in the strangest, softest whisper he had ever heard, as if in it all at once she saw the sun and stars, the day and night, of her whole life.  She looked from his face down into the valley, and into his face again.

“We—­will go,” she repeated, as he rose to his feet.

She shivered when he left her, shuddered with a terrible little cry which she tried to choke back even as she visioned the first glow of that wonderful new life that was dawning for her.  David knew why.  He left her without looking down into her eyes again, anxious to have these last terrible minutes over.  At the open door of the cabin he hesitated, a little sick at what he knew he would see.  And yet, after all, it was no worse than it should be; it was justice.  He told himself this as he stepped inside.