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