She was splendid as she stood there, an exquisite human touch in the savageness of the world about her—and yet strangely wild as she faced David, protecting with her own quivering body the great 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—after me?"
She pointed down the narrow valley, her lips parted as she waited for his answer, her hair rioting over her breast again as she bent toward him.
"I've come fifteen hundred miles—from that direction," said David, swinging an arm toward the backward mountains. "I've never been in this country before. I don't know where the Nest is, or what it is. And I'm not going to take you back to it unless you want to go. If some one is coming after you, and you're bound to fight. I'll help you. Will that bear bite?"