ry strange seemed his
manner to Peter as he walked through the outer room and into the night
beyond. There he stood making no sound or movement, like one of the
lifeless stubs left by fire; and Peter looked up, as his master was
looking, trying to make out what it was he saw in the sky. And nothing
was there--nothing that he had not seen many times before; a billion
stars, and the moon riding King among them all, and fleecy clouds as if
made of web, and stillness, a great stillness that was like sleep in the
lap of the world.

For a little Jolly Roger was silent and then Peter heard him saying,

"Yellow Bird was right--again. She said we'd find a black world down
here and we've found it. And we're going to find Nada where she told us
we'd find her, in that place she called The Country Beyond--the country
beyond the forests, beyond the tall trees and the big swamps, beyond
everything we've ever known of the wild and open spaces; the country
where God lives in churches on Sunday and where people would laugh at
some of our queer notions, Pied-Bot. It's there we'll find Nada, driven
out by the fire, and waiting for us now in the settlements."

He spoke with a strange and quiet conviction, the haggard look dying out
of his face as he stared up into the splendor of the sky.

And then he said.

"We won't sleep tonight, Peter. We'll travel with the moon."

Half an hour later, as the lonely figures of man and dog headed for the
first settlement a dozen miles away, there seemed to come for an instant
the flash of a satisfied smile in the face of the Man in the sky.

CHAPTER XVII

From the cabin McKay went first to the great rock that jutted from the
broken shoulder of Cragg's Ridge, and as they stood there Peter heard
the strange something that was like a laugh, and yet was not a laugh, on
his master's lips. But his scraggly face did not look up. There was
an answering whimper in his throat. He had been slow in sensing the
significance of the mysterious thing that had changed his old home since
months ago. During the hours of afternoon, and these moonlit hours that
followed, he tried to understand. He knew this was home. Yet the green
grass was gone, and a million trees had changed into blackened stubs.
The world was no longer shut in by deep forests. And Cragg's Ridge was
naked where he and Nada had romped in sunshine and flowers, and out of
it all rose the mucky death-smell of the flame-swept earth. These things