reat 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.

"I won't go back!" she said. "I'll--fight!"

Her voice was clear, direct, defiant. Her hands appeared from behind
her, and her little fists were clenched. With a swift movement she
tossed her hair back from about her face. Her eyes were blue, but dark
as thunder clouds in their gathering fierceness. She was like a child,
and yet a woman. A ferocious little person. Ready to fight. Ready to
spring at him if he approached. Her eyes never left his face.

"I won't go back!" she repeated. "I won't!"

He was noticing other things about her. Her moccasins were in tatters.
Her short skirt was torn. Her shining hair was in tangles. As she swept
it back from her face he saw under her eyes the darkness of exhaustion;
in her cheeks a wanness, which he did not know just then was caused by
hunger, and by her struggle to get away from something. On the back of
one of her clenched hands was a deep, red scratch. The look in his face
must have given the girl some inkling of the truth. She leaned a little
forward, quickly and eagerly, and demanded:

"Didn't you come from the Nest? Didn't they send you-