s, the sweet voice, the warm thrill of
her body as she hugged him in her arms. He did not know that she had new
shoes and a new dress, and that some of the color had gone from her red
lips, and that her cheeks were paler, and that she could no longer hide
the old haunted look in her eyes.

But Jolly Roger saw the look, and the growing pallor, and had noted
them for two weeks past. And later that afternoon, when Nada returned to
Cragg's Ridge, and he re-crossed the stream with Peter, there was a hard
and terrible look in his eyes which Peter had caught there more and more
frequently of late. And that evening, in the twilight of their cabin,
Jolly Roger said,

"It's coming soon, Peter. I'm expecting it. Something is happening which
she won't tell us about. She is afraid for me. I know it. But I'm going
to find out--soon. And then, Pied-Bot, I think we'll probably kill Jed
Hawkins, and hit for the North."

The gloom of foreboding that was in Jolly Roger's voice and words seemed
to settle over the cabin for many days after that, and more than ever
Peter sensed the thrill and warning of that mysterious something
which was impending. He was developing swiftly, in flesh and bone and
instinct, and there began to possess him now the beginning of that
subtle caution and shrewdness which were to mean so much to him later
on. An instinct greater than reason, if it was not reason itself, told
him that his master was constantly watching for something which did not
come. And that same instinct, or reason, impinged upon him the fact that
it was a thing to be guarded against. He did not go blindly into the
mystery of things now. He circumvented them, and came up from behind.
Craft and cunning replaced mere curiosity and puppyish egoism. He was
quick to learn, and Jolly Roger's word became his law, so that only once
or twice was he told a thing, and it became a part of his understanding.
While the keen, shrewd brain of his Airedale father developed inside
Peter's head, the flesh and blood development of his big, gentle,
soft-footed Mackenzie hound mother kept pace in his body. His legs and
feet began to lose their grotesqueness. Flesh began to cover the knots
in his tail. His head, bristling fiercely with wiry whiskers, seemed to
pause for a space to give his lanky body a chance to catch up with it.
And in spite of his big feet, so clumsy that a few weeks ago they had
stumbled over everything in his way, he could now travel without mak