It was a grizzly. He guessed so much by the size of the spoor. He followed it across a bar of gravel. Then they turned a twist in the creek and came to other sand. A cry of amazement burst from David's lips when he looked closely at the two trails again.
The moccasins were now following the grizzly!
He stared, for a few moments disbelieving his eyes. Here, too, there was no room for doubt. The feet of the Indian boy had trodden in the tracks of the bear. The evidence was conclusive; the fact astonishing. Of course, it was barely possible....
Whatever the thought might have been in David's mind, it never reached a conclusion. He did not cry out at what he saw after that. He made no sound. Perhaps he did not even breathe. But it was there—under his eyes; inexplicable, amazing, not to be easily believed. A third time the order of the mysterious footprints in the sand was changed—and the grizzly was now following the boy, obliterating almost entirely the indentures in the sand of his small, moccasined feet. He wondered whether it was possible that his eyes had gone bad on him, or that his mind had slipped out of its normal groove and was tricking him with weirdly absurd hallucinations. So what happened in almost that same breath did not startle him as it might otherwise have done. It was for a brief moment simply another assurance of his insanity; and if the mountains had suddenly turned over and balanced themselves on their peaks their gymnastics would not have frozen him into a more speechless stupidity than did the Girl who rose before him just then, not twenty paces away. She had emerged like an apparition from behind a great boulder—a little older, a little taller, a bit wilder than she had seemed to him in the picture, but with that same glorious hair sweeping about her, and that same questioning look in her eyes as she stared at him. Her hands were in that same way at her side, too, as if she were on the point of running away from him. He tried to speak. He believed, afterward, that he even made an effort to hold out his arms. But he was powerless. And so they stood there, twenty paces apart, staring as if they had met from the ends of the earth.
Something happened then to whip David's reason back into its place. He heard a crunching—heavy, slow. From around the other end of the boulder came a huge bear. A monster. Ten feet from the girl. The first cry rushed out of his throat. It was a warning, and in the same instant he raised his rifle to his shoulder. The girl was quicker than he—like an arrow, a flash, a whirlwind of burnished tresses, as she flew to the side of the great beast. She stood with her back against it, her two hands clutching its tawny hair, her slim body quivering, her eyes flashing at David. He felt weak. He lowered his rifle and advanced a few steps.
"Who ... what ..." he managed to say; and stopped. He was powerless to go on. But she seemed to understand. Her body stiffened.
"I am Marge O'Doone," she said defiantly, "and this is my bear!"