he understood, in his dog way. But what he could not understand clearly
was why Nada was not in the cabin, and why they did not find her, even
though the world was changed.

He sat back on his haunches, and Jolly Roger heard again the whimpering
grief in his throat. It comforted the man to know that Peter remembered,
and he was not alone in his desolation. Gently he placed a soot-grimed
hand on his comrade's head.

"Peter, it was from this rock--right where we're standing now--that I
first saw her, a long time ago," he said, a bit of forced cheer breaking
through the huskiness of his voice. "Remember the little jackpine clump
down there? You climbed up onto her lap, a little know-nothing thing,
and you pawed in her loose curls, and growled so fiercely I could hear
you. And when I made a noise, and she looked up, I thought she was the
most beautiful thing I had ever seen--just a kid, with those eyes like
the flowers, and her hair shining in the sun, an' tear stains on her
cheeks. Tear stains, Pied-Bot--because of that snake who's dead over
there. Remember how you growled at me, Peter?"

Peter wriggled an answer.

"That was the beginning," said Jolly Roger, "and this--looks like the
end. But--"

He clenched his fists, and there was a sudden fierceness in the
grotesque movement of his shadow on the rock.

"We're going to find her before that end comes," he added defiantly.
"We're going to find her, Pied-Bot, even if it takes us to the
settlements--right up into the face of the law."

He set out over the rocks, his boots making hollow sounds in the
deadness of the world about them. Again he followed where once had been
the trail that led to Mooney's shack, over on the wobbly line of rail
that rambled for eighty miles into the wilderness from Fort William. The
P. D. & W. it was named--Port Arthur, Duluth & Western; but it had
never reached Duluth, and there were those who had nicknamed it Poverty,
Destruction & Want. Many times Jolly Roger had laughed at the queer
stories Nada told him about it; how a wrecking outfit was always carried
behind on the twice-a-week train, and how the crew picked berries in
season, and had their trapping lines, and once chased a bear half way
to Whitefish Lake while the train waited for hours. She called it the
"Cannon Ball," because once upon a time it had made sixty-nine miles
in twenty-four hours. But there was nothing of humor about it as Jolly
Roger and Peter came out upon it tonigh