ed
why it was that Peter showed no inclination to follow him until he was
urged.

They did not return to the Stew-Kettle until dawn, and most of that
day Jolly Roger spent in sleep between the two big rocks. It was late
afternoon when they made their last meal. In this farewell hour McKay
climbed up close to the pinnacle, where he smoked his pipe and measured
the shadows of the declining sun until it was time to leave for the
jackpines.

Retracing his steps to the hiding place under Gog and Magog he looked
for Peter. But Peter's sand-wallow was empty, and Peter was gone.

CHAPTER VII

Peter was on his way to the mystery of the bundle he had found in the
jackpines.

At the foot of the ridge, where the green plain fought with the
blighting edge of the Stew-Kettle, he stood for many minutes before he
started east-ward. With keen eyes gleaming behind his mop of scraggly
face-bristles he critically surveyed both land and air, and then, with
the slight limp in his gait which would always remain as a mark of Jed
Hawkins' brutality, he trotted deliberately in the direction of the
whiskey-runner's cabin home.

A bitter memory of Jed Hawkins flattened his ears when he came near the
rock-cluttered coulee in which he had fought for Nada, and had suffered
his broken bones, and today--even as he obeyed the instinctive caution
to stop and listen--Jed Hawkins himself came out of the mouth of the
coulee, bearing a brown jug in one hand and a thick cudgel in the other.
His one wicked eye gleamed in the waning sun. His lean and scraggly face
was alight with a sinister exultation as he paused for a moment close to
the rock behind which Peter was hidden, and Peter's fangs lay bare and
his body trembled while the man stood there. Then he moved on, and Peter
did not stir, but waited until the jug and the cudgel and the man were
out of sight.

Low under his breath he was snarling when he went on. Hatred, for a
moment, had flamed hot in his soul. Then he turned, and buried himself
in a clump of balsams that reached out into the plain, and a few moments
later came to the edge of a tiny meadow in the heart of them, where a
warbler was bursting its throat in evening-song.

Around the edge of the meadow Peter circled, his feet deep in buttercups
and red fire-flowers, and crushing softly ripe strawberries that grew
in scarlet profusion in the open, until he came to a screen of young
jackpines, and through these he quietly and apolog