ven of herself and
Lo. So she trotted away. Nevertheless, Lo showed signs of hesitation.
After a few moments Peggy herself hesitated and looked back. The men
had spread out under the trees, and were already lost in the woods. But
there was more than one trail through it, and Peggy knew it.

And here an alarming occurrence startled her. A curiously striped brown
and white squirrel whisked past her and ran up a tree. Peggy's round
eyes became rounder. There was but one squirrel of that kind in all the
length and breadth of Blue Cement Ridge, and that was in the menagerie!
Even as she looked it vanished. Peggy faced about and ran back to the
road in the direction of the stockade, Lo bounding before her. But
another surprise awaited her. There was the clutter of short wings
under the branches, and the sunlight flashed upon the iris throat of a
wood-duck as it swung out of sight past her. But in this single
glance Peggy recognized one of the latest and most precious of her
acquisitions. There was no mistake now! With a despairing little cry to
Lo, "The menagerie's broke loose!" she ran like the wind towards it. She
cared no longer for the mandate of the men; the trail she had taken was
out of their sight; they were proceeding so slowly and cautiously that
she and Lo quickly distanced them in the same direction. She would have
yet time to reach the stockade and secure what was left of her treasures
before they came up and drove her away. Yet she had to make a long
circuit to avoid the blacksmith's shop and cabin, before she saw the
stockade, lifting its four-foot walls around an inclosure a dozen feet
square, in the midst of a manzanita thicket. But she could see also
broken coops, pens, cages, and boxes lying before it, and stopped once,
even in her grief and indignation, to pick up a ruby-throated lizard,
one of its late inmates that had stopped in the trail, stiffened to
stone at her approach. The next moment she was before the roofless
walls, and then stopped, stiffened like the lizard. For out of that
peaceful ruin which had once held the wild and untamed vagabonds of
earth and sky, arose a type of savagery and barbarism the child had
never before looked upon,--the head and shoulders of a hunted, desperate
man!

His head was bare, and his hair matted with sweat over his forehead; his
face was unshorn, and the black roots of his beard showed against the
deadly pallor of his skin, except where it was scratched by thorns,