The Courage of Marge O'Doone

by James Oliver Curwood

"We haven't had anything to eat since we ran away," she said simply. "I'm hungry."

He had heard children say "I'm hungry" in that same voice, with the same hopeful and entreating insistence in it; he had spoken those words himself a thousand times, to his mother, in just that same way, it seemed to him; and as she stood there, looking at his pack, he was filled with a very strong desire to crumple her close in his arms—not as a woman, but as a child. And this desire held him so still for a moment that she thought he was waiting for her to explain.

"I fastened our bundle on Tara's 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. Tara had stretched himself out lazily in the sun and Baree was still between the two rocks, eyeing him watchfully. Before David lighted the fire he spread his one blanket out on the sand and made the Girl sit down. She was close to him, and her eyes did not leave his face for an instant. Whenever he looked up she was gazing straight at him, and when he went down to the creek for another pail of water he felt that her eyes were still on him. When he turned to come back, with fifty paces between them, she smiled at him and he waved his hand at her. He asked her a great many questions while he prepared their dinner. The Nest, he learned, was a free-trading place, and Hauck was its proprietor. He was surprised when he learned that he was not on Firepan Creek after all. The Firepan was over the range, and there were a good many Indians to the north and west of it. Miners came down frequently from the Taku River country and the edge of the Yukon, she said. At least she thought they were miners, for that is what Hauck used to tell Nisikoos, her aunt. They came after whisky. Always whisky. And the Indians came for liquor, too. It was the chief article that Hauck, her uncle, traded in. He brought it from the coast, in the winter time—many sledge loads of it; and some of those "miners" who came down from the north carried away much of it. If it was summer they would take it away on pack horses. What would they do with so much liquor, she wondered? A little of it made such a beast of Hauck, and a beast of Brokaw, and it drove the Indians wild. Hauck would no longer allow the Indians to drink it at the Nest. They had to take it away with them—into the mountains. Just now there was quite a number of the "miners" down from the north, ten or twelve of them. She had not been afraid when Nisikoos, her aunt, was alive. But now there was no other woman at the Nest, except an old Indian woman who did Hauck's cooking. Hauck wanted no one there. And she was afraid of those men. They all feared Hauck, and she knew that Hauck was afraid of Brokaw. She didn't know why, but he was. And she was afraid of them all, and hated them all. She had been quite happy when Nisikoos was alive. Nisikoos had taught her to read out of books, had taught her things ever since she could remember. She could write almost as well as Nisikoos. She said this a bit proudly. But since her aunt had gone, things were terribly changed. Especially the men. They had made her more afraid, every day.

"None of them is like you," she said with startling frankness, her eyes shining at him. "I would love to be with you!"