Peter, thrust back from the door through which through which his master
had gone, listened vainly for the sound of returning footsteps in the
beat of rain and the crash of thunder outside. A strange thing had
burned itself into his soul, a thing that made his flesh quiver and set
hot fires running in his blood. As a dog sometimes senses the stealthy
approach of death, so he began to sense the tragedy of this night that
had brought with it not only a chaos of blackness and storm, but an
anguish which roused an answering whimper in his throat as he turned
toward Nada.
She was crumpled with her head in her arms, where she had flung herself
with Jolly Roger's last kiss of worship on her lips, and she was
sobbing like a child with its heart broken. And beside her knelt the
old gray Missioner, man of God in the deep forest, who stroked her hair
with his thin hand, whispering courage and consolation to her, with the
wind and rain beating overhead and the windows rattling to the
accompaniment of ghostly voices that shrieked and wailed in the
tree-tops outside.
Peter trembled at the sobbing, but his heart and his desire were with
the man who had gone. In his unreasoning little soul it was Jed Hawkins
who was rattling the windows with his unseen hands and who was pounding
at the door with the wind, and who was filling the black night with its
menace and fear. He hated this man, who lay back in the trail with his
lifeless face turned up to the deluge that poured out of the sky. And
he was afraid of the man, even as he hated him, and he believed that
Nada was afraid of him, and that because of her fear she was crying
there in the middle of the floor, with Father John patting her shoulder
and stroking her hair, and saying things to her which he could not
understand. He wanted to go to her. He wanted to feel himself close
against her, as Nada had held him so often in those hours when she had
unburdened her grief and her unhappiness to him. But even stronger than
this desire was the one to follow his master.
He went to the door, and thrust his nose against the crack at the
bottom of it. He felt the fierceness of the wind fighting to break in,
and the broken mist of it filled his nostrils. But there came no scent
of Jolly Roger McKay. For a moment he struggled at the crack with his
paws. Then he flopped himself down, his heart beating fast, and fixed
his eyes inquiringly on Nada and the Missioner.
His four and a half months of life in the big wilderness, and his weeks
of constant comradeship with Jolly Roger, had developed in him a brain
that was older than his body. No process of reasoning could impinge
upon him the fact that his master was an outlaw, but with the swift
experiences of tragedy and hiding and never-ceasing caution had come
instinctive processes which told him almost as much as reason. He knew
something was wrong tonight. It was in the air. He breathed it. It
thrilled in the crash of thunder, in the lightning fire, in the mighty
hands of the wind rocking the cabin and straining at the windows. And
vaguely the knowledge gripped him that the dead man back in the trail
was responsible for it all, and that because of this something that had
happened his mistress was crying and his master was gone. And he
believed he should also have gone with Jolly Roger into the blackness
and mystery of the storm, to fight with him against the one creature in
all the world he hated--the dead man who lay back in the thickness of
gloom between the forest walls.
And the Missioner was saying to Nada, in a quiet, calm voice out of
which the tragedies of years had burned all excitement and passion:
“God will forgive him, my child. In His mercy He will forgive Roger
McKay, because he killed Jed Hawkins to save YOU. But man will not
forgive. The law has been hunting him because he is an outlaw, and to
outlawry he has added what the law will call murder. But God will not
look at it in that way. He will look into the heart of the man, the man
who sacrificed himself--”
And then, fiercely, Nada struck up the Missioner's comforting hand, and
Peter saw her young face white as star-dust in the lampglow.
“I don't care what God thinks,” she cried passionately. “God didn't do
right today. Mister Roger told me everything, that he was an outlaw,
an' I oughtn't to marry him. But I didn't care. I loved him. I could
hide with him. An' we were coming to have you marry us tonight when God
let Jed Hawkins drag me away, to sell me to a man over on the
railroad--an' it was God who let Mister Roger go back and kill him. I
tell you He didn't do right! He didn't--he didn't--because Mister Roger
brought me the first happiness I ever knew, an' I loved him, an' he
loved me--an' God was wicked to let him kill Jed Hawkins--”
Her voice cried out, a woman's soul broken in a girl's body, and Peter
whimpered and watched the Missioner as he raised Nada to her feet and
went with her into his bedroom, where a few minutes before he had
lighted a lamp. And Peter crept in quietly after them, and when the
Missioner had gone and closed the door, leaving them alone in their
tragedy, Nada seemed to see him for the first time and slowly she
reached out her arms.
“Peter!” she whispered. “Peter--Peter--”
In the minutes that followed, Peter could feel her heart beating.
Clutched against her breast he looked up at the white, beautiful face,
the trembling throat, the wide-open blue eyes staring at the one black
window between them and the outside night. A lull had come in the
storm. It was quiet and ominous stillness, and the ticking of a clock,
old and gray like the Missioner himself, filled the room. And Nada,
seated on the edge of Father John's bed, no longer looked like the
young girl of “seventeen goin' on eighteen.” That afternoon, in the
hidden jackpine open, with its sweet-scented jasmines, its violets and
its crimson strawberries under their feet, the soul of a woman had
taken possession of her body. In that hour the first happiness of her
life had come to her. She had heard Jolly Roger McKay tell her those
things which she already knew--that he was an outlaw, and that he was
hiding down on the near-edge of civilization because the Royal Mounted
were after him farther north--and that he was not fit to love her, and
that it was a crime to let her love him. It was then the soul of the
woman had come to her in all its triumph. She had made her choice,
definitely and decisively, without hesitation and without fear. And
now, as she stared unseeingly at the window against which the rain was
beating, the woman in her girlish body rose in her mightier than in the
hour of her happiness, fighting to find a way--crying out for the man
she loved.
Her mind swept back in a single flash through all the years she had
lived, through her years of unhappiness and torment as the foster-girl
of Jed Hawkins and his broken, beaten wife; through summers and winters
that had seemed ages to her, eternities of desolation, of heartache, of
loneliness, with the big wilderness her one friend on earth. As the
window rattled in a fresh blast of storm, she thought of the day months
ago when she had accidentally stumbled upon the hiding-place of Roger
McKay. Since that day he had been her God, and she had lived in a
paradise. He had been father, mother, brother, and at last--what she
most yearned for--a lover to her. And this day, when for the first time
he had held her in his arms, when the happiness of all the earth had
reached out to them, God had put it into Jed Hawkins' heart to destroy
her--and Jolly Roger had killed him!
With a sharp little cry she sprang to her feet, so suddenly that Peter
fell with a thump to the floor. He looked up at her, puzzled, his jaws
half agape. She was breathing quickly. Her slender body was quivering.
Suddenly Peter saw the fire in her eyes and the flame that was rushing
into her white cheeks. Then she turned to him, and panted in a wild
little whisper, so low that the Missioner could not hear:
“Peter, I was wrong. God wasn't wicked to let Mister Roger kill Jed
Hawkins. He oughta been killed. An' God meant him to be killed.
Peter--Peter--we don't care if he's an outlaw! We're goin' with him.
We're goin'--goin'--”
She sprang to the window, and Peter was at her heels as she strained at
it with all her strength, and he could hear her sobbing:
“We're goin' with him, Peter. We're goin'--if we die for it!”
An inch at a time she pried the window up. The storm beat in. A gust of
wind blew out the light, but in the last flare of it Nada saw a knife
in an Eskimo sheath hanging on the wall. She groped for it, and
clutched it in her hand as she climbed through the window and dropped
to the soggy ground beneath. In a single leap Peter followed her.
Blackness swallowed them as they turned toward the trail leading
north--the only trail which Jolly Roger could travel on a night like
this. They heard the voice of the Missioner calling from the window
behind them. Then a crash of thunder set the earth rolling under their
feet, and the lull in the storm came to an end. The sky split open with
the vivid fire of lightning. The trees wailed and whined, the rain fell
again in a smothering deluge, and through it Nada ran, gripping the
knife as her one defense against the demons of darkness--and always
close at her side ran Peter.
He could not see her in that pitchy blackness, except when the
lightning flashes came. Then she was like a ghostly wraith, with
drenched clothes clinging to her until she seemed scarcely dressed, her
wet hair streaming and her wide, staring eyes looking straight ahead.
After the lightning flashes, when the world was darkest, he could hear
the stumbling tread of her feet and the panting of her breath, and now
and then the swish of brush as it struck across her face and breast.
The rain had washed away the scent of his master's feet but he knew
they were following Jolly Roger, and that the girl was running to
overtake him. In him was the desire to rush ahead, to travel faster
through the night, but Nada's stumbling feet and her panting breath and
the strange white pictures he saw of her when the sky split open with
fire held him back. Something told him that Nada must reach Jolly
Roger. And he was afraid she would stop. He wanted to bark to give her
encouragement, as he had often barked in their playful races in the
green plain-lands on the farther side of Cragg's Ridge. But the rain
choked him. It beat down upon him with the weight of heavy hands, it
slushed up into his face from pools in the trail and drove the breath
from him when he attempted to open his jaws. So he ran close--so close
that at times Nada felt the touch of his body against her.
In these first minutes of her fight to overtake the man she loved Nada
heard but one voice--a voice crying out from her heart and brain and
soul, a voice rising above the tumult of thunder and wind, urging her
on, whipping the strength from her frail body in pitiless exhortation.
Jolly Roger was less than half an hour ahead of her. And she must
overtake him--quickly--before the forests swallowed him, before he was
gone from her life forever.
The wall of blackness against which she ran did not frighten her. When
the brush tore at her face and hair she swung free of it, and stumbled
on. Twice she ran blindly into broken trees that lay across her path,
and dragged her bruised body through their twisted tops, moaning to
Peter and clutching tightly to the sheathed knife in her hand. And the
wild spirits that possessed the night seemed to gather about her, and
over her, exulting in the helplessness of their victim, shrieking in
weird and savage joy at the discovery of this human plaything
struggling against their might. Never had Peter heard thunder as he
heard it now. It rocked the earth under his feet. It filled the world
with a ceaseless rumble, and the lightning came like flashes from
swift-loading guns, and with it all a terrific assault of wind and rain
that at last drove Nada down in a crumpled heap, panting for breath,
with hands groping out wildly for him.
Peter came to them, sodden and shivering. His warm tongue found the
palm of her hand, and for a space Nada hugged him close to her, while
she bowed her head until her drenched curls became a part of the mud
and water of the trail. Peter could hear her sobbing for breath. And
then suddenly, there came a change. The thunder was sweeping eastward.
The lightning was going with it. The wind died out in wailing sobs
among the treetops, and the rain fell straight down. Swiftly as its
fury had come, the July storm was passing. And Nada staggered to her
feet again and went on.
Her mind began to react with the lessening of the storm, dragging
itself out quickly from under the oppression of fear and shock. She
began to reason, and with that reason the beginning of faith and
confidence gave her new strength. She knew that Jolly Roger would take
this trail, for it was the one trail leading from the Missioner's cabin
through the thick forest country north. And in half an hour he would
not travel far. The thrilling thought came to her that possibly he had
sought shelter in the lee of a big tree trunk during the fury of the
storm. If he had done that he would be near, very near. She paused in
the trail and gathered her breath, and cried out his name. Three times
she called it, and only the low whine in Peter's throat came in answer.
Twice again during the next ten minutes she cried out as loudly as she
could into the darkness. And still no answer came back to her through
the gloom ahead.
The trail had dipped, and she felt the deepening slush of swamp-mire
under her feet. She sank in it to her shoe-tops, and stumbled into
pools knee-deep, and Peter wallowed in it to his belly. A quarter of an
hour they fought through it to the rising ground beyond. And by that
time the last of the black storm clouds had passed overhead. The rain
had ceased. The rumble of thunder came more faintly. There was no
lightning, and the tree-tops began to whisper softly, as if rejoicing
in the passing of the wind. About them--everywhere--they could hear the
run and drip of water, the weeping of the drenched trees, the gurgle of
flooded pools, and the trickle of tiny rivulets that splashed about
their feet. Through a rift in the breaking clouds overhead came a
passing flash of the moon.
“We'll find him now, Peter,” moaned the girl. “We'll find him--now. He
can't be very far ahead--”
And Peter waited, holding his breath, listening for an answer to the
cry that went out for Jolly Roger McKay.
The glory of July midnight, with a round, full moon straight overhead,
followed the stress of storm. The world had been lashed and inundated,
every tree whipped of its rot and slag, every blade of grass and flower
washed clean. Out of the earth rose sweet smells of growing life, the
musky fragrance of deep moss and needle-mold, and through the clean air
drifted faintly the aroma of cedar and balsam and the subtle tang of
unending canopies and glistening tapestries of evergreen breathing into
the night. The deep forest seemed to tremble with the presence of an
invisible and mysterious life--life that was still, yet wide-awake,
breathing, watchful, drinking in the rejuvenating tonic of the air
which had so quietly followed thunder and lightning and the roar of
wind and rain. And the moon, like a queen who had so ordered these
things, looked down in a mighty triumph. Her radiance, without dust or
fog or forest-smoke to impede its way, was like the mellow glow of
half-day. It streamed through the treetops in paths of gold and silver,
throwing dark shadows where it failed to penetrate, and gathering in
wide pools where its floods poured through broad rifts in the roofs of
the forest. And the trail, leading north, was like a river of
shimmering silver, splitting the wilderness from earth to sky.
In this trail, clearly made in the wet soil, were Jolly Roger's
foot-prints, and in a wider space, where at some time a trapper had
cleared himself a spot for his tepee or shack, Jolly Roger had paused
to rest after his fight through the storm--and had then continued on
his way. And into this clearing, three hours after they left the
Missioner's cabin, came Nada and Peter.
They came slowly, the girl a slim wraith in the moon-light; in the open
they stood for a moment, and Peter's heart weighed heavily within him
as his mistress cried out once more for Jolly Roger. Her voice rose
only in a sob, and ended in a sob. The last of her strength was gone.
Her little figure swayed, and her face was white and haggard, and in
her drawn lips and staring eyes was the agony of despair. She had lost,
and she knew that she had lost as she crumpled down in the trail,
crying out sobbingly to the footprints which led so clearly ahead of
her.
“Peter, I can't go on,” she moaned. “I can't--go on--”
Her hands clutched at her breast. Peter saw the glint of the moonlight
on the ivory sheath of the Eskimo knife, and he saw her white face
turned up to the sky--and also that her lips were moving, but he did
not hear his name come from them, or any other sound. He whined, and
foot by foot began to nose along the trail on the scent left by Jolly
Roger. It was very clear to his nostrils, and it thrilled him. He
looked back, and again he whined his encouragement to the girl.
“Peter!” she called. “Peter!”
He returned to her. She had drawn the knife out of its scabbard, and
the cold steel glistened in her hand. Her eyes were shining, and she
reached out and clutched Peter close up against her, so that he could
hear the choke and throb of her heart.
“Oh, Peter, Peter,” she panted. “If you could only talk! If you could
run and catch Mister Roger, an' tell him I'm here, an' that he must
come back--”
She hugged him closer. He sensed the sudden thrill that leapt through
her body.
“Peter,” she whispered, “will you do it?”
For a few moments she did not seem to breathe. Then he heard a quick
little cry, a sob of inspiration and hope, and her arms came from about
him, and he saw the knife flashing in the yellow moonlight.
He did not understand, but he knew that he must watch her carefully.
She had bent her head, and her hair, nearly dry, glowed softly in the
face of the moon. Her hands were fumbling in the disheveled curls, and
Peter saw the knife flash back and forth, and heard the cut of it, and
then he saw that in her hand she held a thick brown tress of hair that
she had severed from her head. He was puzzled. And Nada dropped the
knife, and his curiosity increased when she tore a great piece out of
her tattered dress, and carefully wrapped the tress of hair in it. Then
she drew him to her again, and tied the knotted fold of dress securely
about his neck; after that she tore other strips from her dress, and
wound them about his neck until he felt muffled and half smothered.
And all the time she was talking to him in a half sobbing, excited
little voice, and the blood in Peter's body ran swifter, and the
strange thrill in him was greater. When she had finished she rose to
her feet, and stood there swaying back and forth, like one of the
spruce-top shadows, while she pointed up the moonlit trail.
“Go, Peter!” she cried softly. “Quick! Follow him, Peter--catch
him--bring him back! Mister Roger--Jolly Roger--go, Peter! Go--go--go--”
It was strange to Peter. But he was beginning to understand. He sniffed
in Jolly Roger's footprints, and then he looked up quickly, and saw
that it had pleased the girl. She was urging him on. He sniffed from
one footprint to another, and Nada clapped her hands and cried out that
he was right--for him to hurry--hurry--
Impulse, thought, swiftly growing knowledge of something to be done
thrilled in his brain. Nada wanted him to go. She wanted him to go to
Jolly Roger. And she had put something around his neck which she wanted
him to take with him. He whined eagerly, a bit excitedly. Then he began
to trot. Instinctively it was his test. She did not call him back. He
flattened his ears, listening for her command to return, but it did not
come. And then the thrill in him leapt over all other things. He was
right. He was not abandoning Nada. He was not running away. She WANTED
him to go!
The night swallowed him. He became a part of the yellow floods of its
moonlight, a part of its shifting shadows, a part of its stillness, its
mystery, its promise of impending things. He knew that grim and
terrible happenings had come with the storm, and he still sensed the
nearness of tragedy in this night-world through which he was passing.
He did not go swiftly, yet he went three times as fast as the girl and
he had traveled together. He was cautious and watchful, and at
intervals he stopped and listened, and swallowed hard to keep the whine
of eagerness out of his throat. Now that he was alone every instinct in
him was keyed to the pulse and beat of life about him. He knew the
Night People of the deep forests were awake. Softly padded, clawed,
sharp-beaked and feathered--the prowlers of darkness were on the move.
With the stillness of shadows they were stealing through the moonlit
corridors of the wilderness, or hovering gray-winged and ghostly in the
ambuscades of the treetops, eager to waylay and kill, hungering for the
flesh and blood of creatures weaker than themselves. Peter knew. Both
heritage and experience warned him. And he watched the shadows, and
sniffed the air, and kept his fangs half bared and ready as he followed
the trail of McKay.
He was not stirred by the impulse of adventure alone. Without the
finesse of what man might charitably call reason in a beast, he had
sensed a responsibility. It was present in the closely drawn strips of
faded cloth about his neck. It was, in a way, a part of the girl
herself, a part of her flesh and blood, a part of her spirit--something
vital to her and dependent upon him. He was ready to guard it with
every instinct of caution and every ounce of courage there was in him.
And to protect it meant to fight. That was the first law of his breed,
the primal warning which came to him through the red blood of many
generations of wilderness forefathers. So he listened, and he watched,
and his blood pounded hot in his veins as he followed the footprints in
the trail. A bit of brush, swinging suddenly free from where it had
been prisoned by the storm, drew a snarl from him as he faced the sound
with the quickness of a cat. A gray streak, passing swiftly over the
trail ahead of him, stirred a low growl in his throat. It was a lynx,
and for a space Peter paused, and then sped soft-footed past the
moon-lit spot where the stiletto-clawed menace of the woods had passed.
Now that he was alone, and no longer accompanied by a human presence
whose footsteps and scent held the wild things aloof and still, Peter
felt nearer and nearer to him the beat and stir of life. Powerful
beaks, instead of remaining closed and without sound, snapped and
hissed at him as the big gray owls watched his passing. He heard the
rustling of brush, soft as the stir of a woman's dress, where living
things were secretly moving, and he heard the louder crash of clumsy
and piggish feet, and caught the strong scent of a porcupine as it
waddled to its midnight lunch of poplar bark. Then the trail ended, and
Jolly Roger's scent led into the pathless forest, with its shifting
streams and pools of moonlight, its shadows and black pits of darkness.
And here--now--Peter began his trespass into the strongholds of the
People of the Night. He heard a wolf howl, a cry filled with
loneliness, yet with a shivering death-note in it; he caught the musky,
skunkish odor of a fox that was stalking prey in the face of a
whispering breath of wind; once, in a moment of dead stillness, he
listened to the snap of teeth and the crackle of bones in one of the
dark pits, where a fisher-cat--with eyes that gleamed like coals of
fire--was devouring the warm and bleeding carcass of a mother
partridge. And beaks snapped at him more menacingly as he went on, and
gray shapes floated over his head, and now and then he heard the cries
of dying things--the agonized squeak of a wood-mouse, the cry of a
day-bird torn from its sleeping place by a sinuous, beady-eyed creature
of fur and claw, the noisy screaming of a rabbit swooped upon and
pierced to the vitals by one of the gray-feathered pirates of the air.
And then, squarely in the center of a great pool of moonlight, Peter
came upon a monster. It was a bear, a huge mother bear, with two
butter-fat cubs wrestling and rolling in the moon glow. Peter had never
seen a bear. But the mother, who raised her brown nose suddenly from
the cool mold out of which she had been digging lily-bulbs, had seen
dogs. She had seen many dogs, and she had heard their howl, and she
knew that always they traveled with man. She gave a deep, chesty sniff,
and close after that sniff a WHOOF that startled the cubs like the
lashing end of a whip. They rolled to her, and with two cuffs of the
mother's huge paws they were headed in the right direction, and all
three crashed off into darkness.
In spite of his swelling heart Peter let out a little yip. It was a
great satisfaction, just at a moment when his nerves were getting
unsteady, to discover that a monster like this one in the moonlight was
anxious to run away from him. And Peter went on, a bit of pride and
jauntiness in his step, his bony tail a little higher.
A mile farther on, in another yellow pool of the moon, lay the partly
devoured carcass of a fawn. A wolf had killed it, and had fed, and now
two giant owls were rending and tearing in the flesh and bowels of what
the wolf had left. They were Gargantuans of their kind, one a male, the
other a female. Their talons warm in blood, their beaks red, their slow
brains drunk with a ravenous greed, they rose on their great wings in
sullen rage when Peter came suddenly upon them. He had ceased to be
afraid of owls. There was something shivery in the gritting of their
beaks, especially in the dark places, but they had never attacked him,
and had always kept out of his reach. So their presence in a black
spruce top directly over the dead fawn did not hold him back now. He
sniffed at the fresh, sweet meat, and hunger all at once possessed him.
Where the wolf had stripped open a tender flank he began to eat, and as
he ate he growled, so that warning of his possessorship reached the
spruce top.
In answer to it came a stir of wings, and the male owl launched himself
out into the moon glow. The female followed. For a few moments they
floated like gray ghosts over Peter, silent as the night shadows. Then,
with the suddenness and speed of a bolt from a catapult, the giant male
shot out of a silvery mist of gloom and struck Peter. The two rolled
over the carcass of the fawn, and for a space Peter was dazed by the
thundering beat of powerful wings, and the hammering of the owl's beak
at the back of his neck. The male had missed his claw-hold, and driven
by rage and ferocity, fought to impale his victim from the ground,
without launching himself into the air again. Swiftly he struck, again
and again, while his wings beat like clubs. Suddenly his talons sank
into the cloth wrapped about Peter's neck. Terror and shock gave way to
a fighting madness inside Peter now. He struck up, and buried his fangs
in a mass of feathers so thick he could not feel the flesh. He tore at
the padded breast, snarling and beating with his feet, and then, as the
stiletto-points of the owl's talons sank through the cloth into his
neck, his jaws closed on one of the huge bird's legs. His teeth sank
deep, there was a snapping and grinding of tendon and bone, and a
hissing squawk of pain and fear came from above him as the owl made a
mighty effort to launch himself free. As the five-foot pinions beat the
air Peter was lifted from the ground. But the owl's talons were
hopelessly entangled in the cloth, and the two fell in a heap again.
Peter scarcely sensed what happened after that, except that he was
struggling against death. He closed his eyes, and the leg between his
jaws was broken and twisted into pulp. The wings beat about him in a
deafening thunder, and the owl's beak tore at his flesh, until the pool
of moonlight in which they fought was red with blood. At last something
gave way. There was a ghastly cry that was like the cry of neither bird
nor beast, a weak flutter of wings, and Gargantua of the Air staggered
up into the treetops and fell with a crash among the thick boughs of
the spruce.
Peter raised himself weakly, the severed leg of the owl dropping from
his jaws. He was half blinded. Every muscle in his body seemed to be
torn and bleeding, yet in his discomfort the thrilling conviction came
to him that he had won. He tensed himself for another attack, hugging
the ground closely as he watched and waited, but no attack came. He
could hear the flutter and wheeze of his maimed adversary, and slowly
he drew himself back--still facing the scene of battle--until in a
farther patch of gloom he turned once more to his business of following
the trail of Jolly Roger McKay.
There was no mark of bravado in his advance now. If he had possessed an
over-growing confidence, Gargantua's attack had set it back, and he
stole like a shifty fox through the night. Driven into his brain was
the knowledge that all things were not afraid of him, for even the
snapping beaks and floating gray shapes to which he had paid but little
attention had now become a deadly menace. His egoism had suffered a
jolt, a healthful reaction from its too swift ascendency. He sensed the
narrowness of his escape without the mental action of reasoning it out,
and his injuries were secondary to the oppressive horror of the uncanny
combat out of which he had come alive. Yet this horror was not a fear.
Heretofore he had recognized the ghostly owl-shapes of night more or
less as a curious part of darkness, inspiring neither like nor dislike
in him. Now he hated them, and ever after his fangs gleamed white when
one of them floated over his head.
He was badly hurt. There were ragged tears in his flank and back, and a
last stroke of Gargantua's talons had stabbed his shoulder to the bone.
Blood dripped from him, and one of his eyes was closing, so that shapes
and shadows were grotesquely dim in the night. Instinct and caution,
and the burning pains in his body, urged him to lie down in a thicket
and wait for the day. But stronger than these were memory of the girl's
urging voice, the vague thrill of the cloth still about his neck, and
the freshness of Jolly Roger's trail as it kept straight on through the
forest's moonlit corridors and caverns of gloom.
It was in the first graying light of July dawn that Peter dragged
himself up the rough side of a ridge and looked down into a narrow
strip of plain on the other side. Just as Nada had given up in weakness
and despair, so now he was almost ready to quit. He had traveled miles
since the owl fight, and his wounds had stiffened, and with every step
gave him excruciating pain. His injured eye was entirely closed, and
there was a strange, dull ache in the back of his head, where Gargantua
had pounded him with his beak. The strip of valley, half hidden in its
silvery mist of dawn, seemed a long distance away to Peter, and he
dropped on his belly and began to lick his raw shoulder with a feverish
tongue. He was sick and tired, and the futility of going farther
oppressed him. He looked again down into the strip of plain, and whined.
Then, suddenly, he smelled something that was not the musty fog-mist
that hung between the ridges. It was smoke. Peter's heart beat faster,
and he pulled himself to his feet, and went in its direction.
Hidden in a little grassy cup between two great boulders that thrust
themselves out from the face of the ridge, he found Jolly Roger. First
he saw the smouldering embers of a fire that was almost out--and then
his master. Jolly Roger was asleep. Storm-beaten and strangely haggard
and gray his face was turned to the sky. Peter did not awaken him.
There was something in his master's face that quieted the low whimper
in his throat. Very gently he crept to him, and lay down. The movement,
slight as it was, made the man stir. His hand rose, and then fell
limply across Peter's body. But the fingers moved.
Unconsciously, as if guided by the spirit and prayer of the girl
waiting far back in the forest, they twined about the cloth around
Peter's neck--his message to his master.
And for a long time after that, as the sun rose over a wonderful world,
Peter and his master slept.