hiter than the gray ash of fire.

"My God," he whispered huskily. "I thought--she had died!"

It was only then Father John understood the meaning of what he had seen
in his face.

"No, she is alive," he cried. "I sent her straight north through the
bush with an Indian the day after the fire. And later I left word for
you with the Fire Relief Committee at Fort William, where I thought you
would first enquire."

"And it was there," said Jolly Roger, "that I did not enquire at all!"

In the edge of the clearing, close to the thicket of timber, Nada had
stopped. For across the open space a strange looking creature had raced
at the sound of her voice; a dog with bristling Airedale whiskers, and
a hound's legs, and wild-wolf's body hardened and roughened by months of
fighting in the wilderness. As in the days of his puppyhood, Peter leapt
up against her, and a cry burst from Nada's lips, a wild and sobbing cry
of PETER, PETER, PETER--and it was this cry Jolly Roger heard as he tore
away from Father John.

On her knees, with her arms about Peter's shaggy head, Nada stared
wildly at the clump of timber, and in a moment she saw a man break out
of it, and stand still, as if the mellow sunlight blinded him, and made
him unable to move. And the same choking weakness was at her own heart
as she rose up from Peter, and reached out her arms toward the gray
figure in the edge of the wood, sobbing, trying to speak and yet saying
no word.

And a little slower, because of his age, Father John came a moment
later, and peered out with the knowledge of long years from a thicket
of young banksians, and when he saw the two in the open, close in
each other's arms, and Peter hopping madly about them, he drew out a
handkerchief and wiped his eyes, and went back then for the axe which he
had dropped in the timber clump.

There was a great drumming in Jolly Roger's head, and for a time he
failed even to hear Peter yelping at their side, for all the world was
drowned in those moments by the breaking sobs in Nada's breath and the
wild thrill of her body in his arms; and he saw nothing but the upturned
face, crushed close against his breast, and the wide-open eyes, and the
lips to kiss. And even Nada's face he seemed to see through a silvery
mist, and he felt her arms strangely about his neck, as if it was all
half like a dream--a dream of the kind that had come to him beside his
campfire. It was a little cry from Nada that drove the unrealit