Father John, in passing him, paused to lay a hand on his head.

"Some day it may please God to let us go to them," he consoled,
speaking for himself even more than for Peter. "Some day, when they are
far away--and safe."

He felt Peter suddenly stiffen under his hand, and from the Leaf Bud
came a low, swift word of warning.

She began singing softly, and dishes and pans already clean rattled
under her hands in the kitchen, and she continued to sing even as the
cabin door opened and Breault the man-hunter stood in it.

The unexpectedness of his appearance, without the sound of a warning
footstep outside, was amazing even to Peter. In the open door he stood
for a moment, his thin, ferret-like face standing out against the black
background of the night, and his strange eyes, apparently half closed
yet bright as diamonds, sweeping the interior without effort but with
the quickness of lightning.

There was something deadly and foreboding about him as he stood here,
and Peter growled low in his throat. Recognition flashed upon him in an
instant. It was the man of the snow-dune, away up on the Barren, the
man whom he had mistrusted from the beginning, and from whom they had
fled into the face of the Big Storm months ago. His mind worked
swiftly, even as swiftly as Breault's in its way, and without any
process of reasoning he sensed menace and enmity in this man's
appearance, and associated with it the mysterious flight of Jolly Roger
and Nada.

Breault had nodded, without speaking. Then his eyes rested on Peter,
and his face broke into a twisted sort of smile. It was not altogether
unpleasant, yet was there something about it which made one shiver. It
spoke the character of the man, pitiless, determined, omniscient
almost, as if the spirit of a grim and unrelenting fate walked with him.

Again he nodded, and held out a hand.

"Peter," he called. "Come here, Peter!"

Peter flattened his ears a fraction of an inch, but did not move. Even
that fraction of an inch caught Breault's keen eyes.

"Still a one-man dog," he observed, stepping well inside the cabin, and
facing Father John. "Where is McKay, Father?"

He had not closed the door, and Peter saw his chance. The Leaf Bud saw
him pass like a shot out into the night, but as he went she made no
effort to call him back, for her ears were wide open as Breault
repeated his question,

"Where is McKay, Father?"

Peter heard the man-hunter's voice from the darkness outs