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.