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.
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