ervals, who caught the first message of life. From a long
distance away came faintly the barking of a dog.

Half a mile farther on they came to a clearing where no stubs of trees
stood up like question marks against the sky, and in this clearing was
a cabin, a dark blotch that was without light or sound. But from behind
it the dog barked again, and Jolly Roger made quickly toward it. Here
there was no ash under his feet, and he knew that at last he had found
an oasis of life in the desolation. Loudly he knocked with his fist at
the cabin door and soon there was a response inside, the heavy movement
of a man's body getting out of bed, and after that the questioning
voice of a woman. He knocked again and the flare of a lighted match
illumined the window. Then came the drawing of a bar at the door and a
man stood there in his night attire, a man with a heavy face and
bristling beard, and a lamp in his hand.

"I beg your pardon for waking you," said Jolly Roger, "but I am just
down from the north, hoping to find my friends back here and I have
seen nothing but destruction and death. You are the first living soul I
have found to ask about them."

"Where were they?" grunted the man.

"At Cragg's Ridge."

"Then God help them," came the woman's voice from back in the room.

"Cragg's Ridge," said the man, "was a burning hell in the middle of the
night."

Jolly Roger's fingers dug into the wood at the edge of the door.

"You mean--"

"A lot of 'em died," said the man stolidly, as if eager to rid himself
of the one who had broken his sleep. "If it was Mooney, he's dead. An'
if it was Robson, or Jake the Swede, or the Adams family--they're dead,
too."

"But it wasn't," said Jolly Roger, his heart choking between fear and
hope. "It was Father John, the Missioner, and Nada Hawkins, who lived
with him--or with her foster-mother in the Hawkins' cabin."

The man shook his head, and turned down the wick of his lamp.

"I dunno about the girl, or the old witch who was her mother," he said,
"but the Missioner made it out safe, and went to the settlements."

"And no girl was with him?"

"No, there was no girl," came the woman's voice again, and Peter jerked
up his ears at the creaking of a bed. "Father John stopped here the
second day after the fire had passed, and he said he was gathering up
the bones of the dead. Nada Hawkins wasn't with him, and he didn't say
who had died and who hadn't. But I think--"

She stopped as t