and his eyes popped, and grew like little
balls of fire in his intense desire to see through the gloom. Even the
girl, who was afraid of only one thing in the world, would have paused
where Peter stood, with a little quickening of her heart. For all the
light of the day, it seemed to Peter, had suddenly died out. Over his
head the spruce and cedar and balsam tops grew so thick they were like
a canopy of night. Through them the snow never came in winter, and under
them the light of a blazing sun was only a ghostly twilight.

And now, as he stood there, his whole soul burning with a desire to see
his way out, Peter began to hear strange sounds. Strangest of all, and
most fearsome, was a hissing that came and went, sometimes very near to
him, and always accompanied by a grating noise that curdled his blood.
Twice after that he saw the shadow of the great owl as it swooped over
him, and he flattened himself down, the knot in his throat growing
bigger and more choking. And then he heard the soft and uncanny movement
of huge feathered bodies in the thick shroud of boughs overhead, and
slowly and cautiously he wormed himself around, determined to get back
to sunshine and day as quickly as he could. It was not until he had
made this movement that the real chill of horror gripped at his heart.
Straight behind him, directly in the path he had traveled, he saw two
little green balls of flame!

It was instinct, and not reason or experience, which told Peter there
was menace and peril in these two tiny spots blazing in the gloom.
He did not know that his own eyes, popping half out of his head, were
equally terrifying in that pit of silence, nor that from him emanated a
still more terrifying thing--the scent of dog. He trembled on his wobbly
legs as the green eyes stared at him, and his back seemed to break
in the middle, so that he sank helplessly down upon the soft spruce
needles, waiting for his doom. In another flash the twin balls of green
fire were gone. In a moment they appeared again, a little farther away.
Then a second time they were gone, and a third time they flashed back
at him--so distant they appeared like needle-points in the darkness.
Something stupendous rose up in Peter. It was the soul of his Airedale
father, telling him the other thing was running away! And in the joy of
triumph Peter let out a yelp. In that night-infested place, alive
with hiding things, the yelp set loose weird rustlings in the tangled
treetop