re and they would return. Cabins would send up their smoke again.
Brown-faced children would play about the tepee door. Ten thousand
dwellers of the forests, white and half-breed and Indian born, would
trickle in twos and threes and family groups back into the age-old trade
of a domain that reached from Hudson's Bay to the western mountains and
from the Height of Land to the Arctic Sea.

Until then nature was free, and in its freedom ran in riotous silence
over the land. These were days when the wolf lay with her young, but did
not howl; when the lynx yawned sleepily, and hunted but little--days
of breeding, nights of drowsy whisperings, and of big red moons, and of
streams rippling softly at lowest ebb while they dreamed of rains and
flood-time. And through it all--through the lazy drone of insects, the
rustling sighs of the tree-tops and the subdued notes of living things
ran a low and tremulous whispering, as if nature had found for itself a
new language in this temporary absence of man.

To Jolly Roger this was Life, It breathed for him out of the cool earth.
He heard it over him, and under him, and on all sides of him where other
ears would have found only a thing vast and oppressive and silent. On
what he called these "motherhood days of the earth" the passing years
had built his faith and his creed.

One evening he stopped for camp at the edge of the Burntwood. From his
feet reached out the wide river, ankle deep in places, knee deep in
others, rippling and singing between sandbars and driftwood where in May
and June it had roared with the fury of flood Peter, half asleep after
their day's travel through a hot forests watched his master. Since their
flight from the edge of civilization far south he had grown heavier and
broadened out. The hardship of adventuring and the craft of fighting for
food and life had whipped the last of his puppyhood behind him At six
months of age he was scarred, and lithe-muscled, and ready for instant
action at all times. Through the mop of Airedale whiskers that covered
his face his bright eyes were ever alert, and always they watched the
back-trail as he wondered why the slim, blue-eyed girl they both loved
and missed so much did not come. And vaguely he wondered why it was that
his master always went on and on, and never waited for her to catch up
with them.

And Jolly Roger was changed. He was not the plump and rosy-faced
wilderness freebooter who whistled and sang away down at