ra! Tara!_"
Over him he heard a sudden roar, the rush of a great body--and with that
thunder of Tara's rage and vengeance there mingled a hideous, wolfish
snarl from Baree. He could see nothing. Hauck's hands were at his
throat.

But the screams continued, and above them came now the cries of
men--cries of horror, of agony, of death; and as Hauck's fingers
loosened at his neck he heard with the snarling and roaring and
tumult the crushing of great jaws and the thud of bodies. Hauck
was rising, his face blanched with a strange terror. He was half
up when a gaunt, lithe body shot at him like a stone flung from a
catapult and Baree's inch-long fangs sank into his thick throat
and tore his head half from his body in one savage, snarling snap
of the jaws. David raised himself and through the horror of what he
saw the Girl ran to him--unharmed--and clasped her arms about him,
her lips sobbing all the time--"_Tara--Tara--Tara_...." He turned
her face to his breast, and held it there. It was ghastly. Henry was
dead. Hauck was dead. And Brokaw was dead--a thousand times dead--with
the grizzly tearing his huge body into pieces.

Through that pit of death David stumbled with the Girl. The fresh air
struck their faces. The sun of day fell upon them. The green grass and
the flowers of the mountain were under their feet. They looked down the
slope, and saw, disappearing over the crest of the _coulee_, two men who
were running for their lives.

CHAPTER XXVII

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 st