ed, and here and there little pools, round which white
stones lay in the dark peat, flashed in the sunshine. The pale-blue of
the sky changed near the horizon to delicate green, and a soft breeze
blew across the waste. Foster enjoyed the walk, although he was
puzzled and somewhat disturbed. If inquiries had been made about
Featherstone, he could have understood it, but the police were asking
for a man with a glove on his left hand, which could only apply to him.
Daly, of course, would be glad to get him out of the way, if he had
learned that he was in Scotland, but the police could not arrest a man
who had done nothing wrong.

Foster now regretted that he had helped the poachers, although he
thought he had made friends who would not betray him and might be
useful. He had met Border Scots in Ontario, and knew something about
their character. They were marked by a stern independence, inherited
from their moss-trooper ancestors, and he thought Pete was a typical
specimen of the virile race. The man met him at the broken dyke, and
leaving the road they turned east up the side of a sparkling burn.

The narrow strip of level ground was wet and covered with moss, in
which their feet sank, but the hillside was too steep to walk along.
It ran up, a slope of gray-white grass, to the ragged summit where the
peat was gashed and torn. Here and there a stunted thorn tree grew in
a hollow, but the glen was savagely desolate, and Foster, glancing at
his companion, thought he understood why the men who wrung a living
from these barren hills prospered when they came out to the rich
wheat-soil of Canada. The Flowers of the Forest, who fell at Flodden,
locking fast the Scottish square against the onslaught of England's
finest cavalry, were bred in these wilds, and had left descendants
marked by their dour stubbornness. Pete's hair was turning gray and
his brown face was deeply lined, but he crossed the quaking moss with a
young man's stride, and Foster thought his mouth could set hard as
granite in spite of his twinkling smile. He was a man who would forget
neither a favor nor an injury, and Foster was glad to feel that he was
on his side.

At the head of the glen they climbed a long grassy slope and came to a
tableland where the peat was torn into great black rifts and piled in
hummocks. This was apparently Nature's work, but Foster could not see
how the storms that burst upon the hills could have worked such havoc.
Crossing