The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. The illustration used in the cover is the frontispiece.

A Gentleman of
COURAGE

Frontispiece--PETER was the same Peter, but now he was a man

Copyright, 1923, by International Magazine Company.
Copyright, 1924, by International Magazine Company.
Copyright, 1924, by Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, New
York. All rights reserved, including that of translation into
foreign languages, including the Scandinavian.
Printed in the United States of America by
J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK

The Illustrations
consist of
A Frontispiece and a Centerspread
reproduced in Color from the
Original Paintings by
ROBERT W. STEWART

A Gentleman of
COURAGE

CONTENTS

A Gentleman of
COURAGE

[CHAPTER I]

Pierre Gourdon had the love of God in his heart, a man's love for a man's God, and it seemed to him that in this golden sunset of a July afternoon the great Canadian wilderness all about him was whispering softly the truth of his faith and his creed. For Pierre was the son of a runner of the streams and forests, as that son's father had been before him, and love of adventure ran in his blood, and romance, too; so it was only in the wild and silent places that he felt the soul in him attuned to that fellowship with nature which the good teachers at Ste. Anne de Beaupré did not entirely approve. Nature was Pierre's God, and would ever be until he died. And though he had crept up the holy stair at Ste. Anne's on his knees, and had touched the consecrated water from the sacred font, and had looked with awe upon mountains of canes and crutches left by those who had come afflicted and doubting and had departed cured and believing, still he was sure that in this sunset of a certain July afternoon he was nearer to the God he desired than at any other time in all his life.

Josette, his wife, slender and tired, her dark head bare in the fading sun, stood wistful and hoping at his side, praying gently that at last their long wanderings up the St. Lawrence and along this wilderness shore of Superior had come to an end, and that they might abide in this new paradise, and never travel again until the end of their days.

Back of them, where a little stream ran out of the cool forest, a tireless boy quested on hands and knees in the ferns and green grass for wild strawberries, and though strawberry season was late his mouth was smeared red.

The man said, pointing down, "It makes one almost think the big lake is alive, and a hand is reaching in for him."

"Yes, they are Five Fingers of water reaching in from the lake," agreed Josette, seating herself wearily upon a big stone, "though it seems to me there should be only four fingers, and one thumb."

And so the place came to be named, and through all the years that have followed since that day it has tenaciously clung to its birthright.

The boy came to his mother, bringing her strawberries to eat; and the man, climbing a scarp of rock, made a megaphone of his hands and hallooed through it until an answering shout came from deep in the spruces and balsams, and a little later Dominique Beauvais came out to the edge of the slope, his whiskered face bright with expectancy, and with him his little wife Marie, panting hard to keep pace with his long legs.

When they were together Pierre Gourdon made a wide and all-embracing sweep with his arms.

"This will be a good place to live in," he said. "It is what we have been looking for."

With enthusiasm Dominique agreed. The women smiled. Again they were happy. The boy was hunting for strawberries. He was always empty, this boy.

Pierre Gourdon kissed his wife's smooth hair as they went back to the camp they had made two hours earlier in the day, and broke into a wild boat song which his grandfather had taught him on his knee in the wicked days before he had known Josette at Ste. Anne, and Dominique joined in heartily through his whiskers.

The women's smiles were sweeter and their eyes brighter, for fatigue seemed to have run away from them now that their questing men-folk were satisfied and had given them a promise of home.

That night, after supper, with their green birch camp-fire lighting up the blackness of the wilderness, they sat and made plans, and long after nine-year-old Joe had crawled into his blanket to sleep, and the women's eyes were growing soft with drowsiness, Pierre and Dominique continued to smoke pipefuls of tobacco and to build over and over the homes of their dreams.

Young and happy, and overflowing with the adventurous enthusiasm of the race of coureurs from which they had sprung, they saw themselves with the rising of another sun pitched into the heart of realities which they had anticipated for a long time; and when at last Josette fell asleep, her head pillowed close to her boy's, her red lips that had not lost their prettiness through motherhood and wandering were tender with a new peace and contentment. And a little later, while Pierre and Dominique still smoked and painted their futures, the moon rose over the forest-tops in a great golden welcome to the pioneers, and the wind came in softly and more coolly from the lake, and at the last, from far away, rose faintly a wilderness note that thrilled them—the cry of wolves.

Dominique listened, and silently emptied the ash from his pipe into the palm of his hand.

"Where wolves run there is plenty of game, and where there is game there is trapping," he said.

And then came a sound which stopped the hearts of both for an instant, a deep and murmuring echo, faint and very far, that broke in a note of strange and vital music upon the stillness of the night.

"A ship!" whispered Pierre.

"Yes, a ship!" repeated Dominique, half rising to catch the last of the sound.

For this was a night of forty years ago, when on the north shore of Superior the cry of wolves in the forest was commoner than the blast of a ship's whistle at sea.

The pioneers slept. The yellow moon climbed up until it was straight overhead. Shadows in the deep forest moved like living things. The wolves howled, circled, came nearer, and stopped their cry where the kill was made. Mellow darkness trembled and thrilled with life. Silent-winged creatures came and disappeared like ghosts. Bright eyes watched the sleeping camp of the home seekers. A porcupine waddled through it, chuckling and complaining in his foolish way. A buck caught the scent of it, stamped his foot and whistled. There were whisperings in the tall, dark spruce tops.

Caverns of darkness gave out velvety footfalls of life, and little birds that were silent in the day uttered their notes softly in the moon glow.

A bar of this light lay across Josette's face, softening it and giving to its beauty a touch of something divine. The boy was dreaming. Pierre slept with his head pillowed in the crook of his arm. Dominique's whiskers were turned to the sky, bristling and fierce, as if he had taken this posture to guard against harm the tired little wife who lay at his side.

So the night passed, and dawn came, wakening them with the morning chatter of a multitude of red squirrels in a little corner of the world as yet unspoiled by man.

That first day from which they began to measure their new lives the axes of Pierre and Dominique struck deep into the sweetly scented hearts of the cedar trees out of which they were to build their homes at Five Fingers. But first they looked more carefully into the prospects of their domain.

The forest was back of them, a forest of high ridges and craggy ravines, of hidden meadows and swamps, a picturesque upheaval of wild country which reached for many miles from the Superior shore to the thin strip of settlement lands along the Canadian Pacific. Black and green and purple with its balsam, cedar and spruce, silver and gold with its poplar and birch, splashed red with mountain ash, its climbing billows and dripping hollows were radiantly tinted by midsummer sun—and darkly sullen and mysterious under cloud or storm. Out of these fastnesses, choked with ice and snow in winter, Pierre knew how the floods must come roaring in springtime, and his heart beat exultantly, for he loved the rush and thunder of streams, and the music of water among rocks.

At the tip of the longest of the five inlets which broke like gouging fingers through the rock walls of the lake half a mile away they decided upon the sites for their cabins. Against those walls they could hear faintly the moaning of surf, never quite still even when there was no whisper of wind. But the long finger of water, narrow and twisted, as if broken at the joint, was a placid pool of green and silver over which the gulls floated, calling out their soft notes in welcome to the home builders, and in its white sand were the prints of many feet, both of birds and of beasts, who played and washed themselves there, and came down to drink. Between these two, the open and peaceful serenity of the inlet and the cool, still hiding-places of the forest, were the green meadowland and slopes and patches of level plain, a narrow strip of park-like beauty at the upper edge of which, in the very shadow of the forest, Pierre and Dominique struck off their plots and squared their angles, making ready for the logs in which the afternoon saw their axes buried.

The days passed. Each dawn the red squirrel chorus greeted the rising sun; through hours that followed came the ring of steel and the freedom of voice which is born of love and home. Pierre sang, as his grandfather had sung long years ago, and Dominique bellowed like a baying hound when the chorus came. Women's laughter rose with the singing of the birds. Josette and Marie were girls again, and the boy was forever leading them to newly discovered strawberry patches hidden among the rocks and grass and ferns.

It was a new thing for the wilderness, this invasion of human life, and for a long time it fell away from them, listening, frightened and subdued. But the birds and the red squirrels gave it courage, and softly it returned, curious and shy and friendly. The deer came down to drink again in the dusk, and moose rattled their antlers up the ridge. Pop-eyed whisky jacks began to eat bannock crumbs close to Josette's hands. Jays came nearer to scream their defiance, like wild Indians, in the tree-tops, and thrushes and warblers sang until their throats were ready to burst, and twenty times a day Pierre would pause in his labor and say, "This is going to be a fine place to live in, with the sea at our front door and the woods at our back."

He called Superior "the sea," and twice in the first week they saw far out in its hazy vastness white and shimmering specks which were sailing ships.

Log upon log the first of the cabins rose, until the roof was covered, and scarcely was it done when Josette and Marie were planting wild morning glories and crimson splashes of roses about it, and were digging in the dark, cool mold of birch and poplar thickets for violet roots, and out in the sheltered fens and meadow-dips for hyacinths and fire-flowers; and in the hour before dusk, when the day's work was over and supper was eaten, they would go hand in hand with their men-folk to study and ponder over the fertile patches of earth here and there where next spring they would plant potatoes and carrots and turnips and all the other fine things they had known back in the land of Ste. Anne.

It was August when the two cabins were finished, small in dimensions but snug as dovecotes, and in the eyes of Josette and Marie grew a deeper and more serious look. For they were housewives again, with little to do with, but with a world full of endeavor and anticipation ahead of them. And it worried them to see that the fruits were ripening, red raspberries so thick the bears were turning into hulks of fat, black currants and saskatoons among the rocks, and all over the ridgesides great trees of wild plums and mountain ash berries, waiting for the first frosts to make them ready for preserves and jams.

So Dominique, one day, set out to blaze a trail to the nearest settlement, thirty miles away; and thereafter their men-folk took turns, one and then the other, going with empty pack and returning with sixty pounds of burden, and berries were put into cans and dried and preserved—until Pierre and Dominique began to tease their wives and ask them if they wanted their husbands to turn into bears and sleep on their fat all winter. It was this banter which reminded Josette of candles, and in September they killed two bears and made several hundred of them.

With the first frosts of autumn Pierre said even more frequently than before, "This is a fine place to live in," and Josette and Marie, seeing what the frosts were doing, rose each morning with new wonder and new joy in their eyes. For if these frosts were giving to the waters of the lake a colder and harder sheen, with something of menace and gloom about it, they were also painting the ridges and hollows and all the forest land as far as they could see with a glory of color which they had never known at Ste. Anne.

Breath of winter came in the nights. Higher grew the great birch piles of firewood which Pierre and Dominique dragged close to the cabin doors, and very soon came the days when the carnival of autumn color was gone and all but the evergreen trees assumed the ragged distress of naked limbs and branches, and winds broke down fiercely over the wilderness, and the moan of the lake, beating against its rock walls, grew clearer and at times was a muffled and sullen roar half a mile away.

But these changes were not frightening to Pierre and his people. Canadian winter was, after all, the heart of their lives; long months of adventure and thrill of deep snows and stinging blizzards on the trap lines, of red-hot stoves, and snug evenings at home telling the tales of the day, and appetites as keen as the winds that howled down from the north.

This season, of all seasons, they would not have changed. It was then the wolf howl took on a new note, the foxes cried out hungrily at the edge of the clearing in the night. The call of the moose floated awesomely through the frost of still evenings, and the bears hunted their dens. One after another songbirds departed, leaving the whisky jacks and the jays behind, and the ravens gathered in flocks, while in the thickets and swamps the big snowshoe rabbits turned from brown to gray and from gray to white. All hunting things were astir, from the wolf and the fox and the little outlaw ermine to the owl and the dog-faced fisher-cat, and in November Pierre and Dominique dipped their traps in hot bear grease and prayed for the first snow.

It came in the night, so quietly that none heard the breathless fall of it, and the world was white when little Joe got out of his bed at dawn to look at his rabbit snares in the edge of the timber. That was the beginning of their first winter at Five Fingers. It was a cold, dry winter, and there was never a day that a haunch of venison or moose meat was not hanging behind the cabins. Trapping was good, and the store of pelts grew as the weeks went on, until Pierre and Dominique both swore in the same breath that it was a paradise that they had found on this north shore of Superior, and each day they made new promises of what they would buy for Josette and Marie in the spring. The snow piled itself deeper, and the lake froze over. In January it was thirty degrees below zero.

The white world, Josette called it, and at times they all played in it like children. There was Christmas, and then New Year's, and a birthday for Marie, and games and stories at night round the crackling stoves in the cabins. Pierre and Dominique built toboggans, and from the crest of the ridge where they had first looked down upon the Five Fingers they sped in wild races over the open and halfway across the snow-crusted ice of the middle finger. And yet when Dominique came in one day and said quite casually that he had heard the chirp of a brush warbler back in the big swamp Marie gave a little cry of delight and Josette's eyes grew suddenly bright.

It meant spring. A day or two later Pierre said the coats of the snowshoe rabbits were turning rusty, which meant early spring. Then came discovery of the first bear track, the track of a foolish bear who had come out hungrily, like a woodchuck, only to hunt himself a den again when he saw his shadow freezing in the snow. After this there was more sun in the morning and less of the cold of sullen twilight each night, and before even the crust of the snow had begun to thaw Pierre brought in a poplar twig to show how the buds were swelling until they seemed ready to pop. "I have never seen them fatter," he said. "It means spring isn't far away."

When the first robin came Josette told her husband she could already smell the perfume of flowers. He was a cold-footed and crabbed-looking bird, forlorn and disappointed at the world's chill aspect, and for a few minutes he sat humped up on the roof log and then flew away.

This was the beginning. The snow began to thaw on the sunny sides of the slopes, and after that the change came swiftly. In April a steady and swelling murmur ran through the forests, the music of the gathering waters. Meadows and flats became flooded, little creeks changed suddenly into rushing torrents, lakes and ponds crept up over their sides, and the tiny stream which passed near the cabins, quiet and gentle in summertime, was all at once a riotous and quarrelsome outlaw, roaring and foaming in its mad rush down to the Middle Finger. Half a mile away was a larger stream whose flood sounds came to them like the distant roar of a cataract. It was glorious music, with something in it that stirred the blood of Pierre and his people like tonic and wine. Pierre, in his optimism and love of life, explained it all by saying, "It is good to have a long, cold winter that we may fully enjoy the spring."

The birds seemed to return in a night and a day—robins perky and glad to get back from the lazy southland, thrushes and catbirds and a dozen kinds of little brown warblers and brush sparrows whose voices were sweetest of all the spring songsters. The earth itself began to breathe with swelling roots and tips of green; the first flowers popped up; the poplar buds exploded into fuzzy leaves, and Pierre and Dominique worked from morning until night, clearing the patches they were to plant this year, and spading up the rich, dark soil.

It was about this time Pierre gave voice to a thought which had been growing in his head all winter. He was standing with Josette at the tip of the green ridge from which they had first looked down upon Five Fingers.

"Ste. Anne was never as fine as this, chérie," he said.

"No, not even before the woods were cut," agreed Josette.

He took her hand and held it softly in his own, and Josette laid her cheek against his shoulder so that his lips could touch her smooth hair. Pierre always liked it that way.

"I have been having a dream," he said, his voice a little queer because of its secret, and because he knew how its confession would thrill the one at his side, "and I have said nothing about it, but have done much thinking. Would not a little church look pretty down there, just where the tip of the evergreen forest reaches to the Middle Finger?"

"A church!" whispered Josette, her heart giving a sudden swift beat.

"Yes, a church," chuckled Pierre softly. "And over there, in that green bit of meadow—what a place for a home for our old friend Poleon Dufresne, and Sara, and all the children. And there is room for the Clamarts, too, and Jean Croisset and his wife. It is a big land, with plenty of fur and game and good rich soil underfoot, and I have thought it is not right to keep it all to ourselves, douce amie."

From the door of her cabin some distance away Marie Beauvais wondered just why it was that Josette threw her arms so suddenly round her husband's neck and kissed him. And Pierre, with a heart full of happiness, little guessed that with the fulfilment of his dreams would come tragedy into the wilderness paradise at Five Fingers.

[CHAPTER II]

It was five years later that Simon McQuarrie and Herman Vogelaar came to Five Fingers. They were a queer but lovable combination. Simon was a Scotchman, tall and spare, with a thin face which seldom broke into a smile and which had the appearance of being made of flint. His companion was a Dutchman, short and round as a dumpling, with a pink, smooth face, light blue eyes and a great habit of puffing when he exerted himself a little, which came, Simon said, from overeating. They had been boys together more than thirty years ago in a little Ontario town, and now they were partners, timber-looking, prospecting and bartering and saving a little money as the years went on. Herman was a widower, and his only daughter, Geertruda, had married Jeremie Poulin back in Quebec, and Jeremie was a cousin of the Clamarts and lived now at Five Fingers. It was Herman's first visit. He had come to see the new baby and had brought Simon along with him.

The instant Simon's shrewd eyes came upon the clearing and the little settlement, with the fingers of water reaching in from the big lake, he began having thoughts which he did not at once announce to Herman.

The years had brought changes to Five Fingers. The single-room cabins which Pierre and Dominique had built were gone, and in their places stood larger buildings of clean-cut and nicely squared logs, with flowers and garden plots around them, and rows of smooth stones painted white. Josette, now almost forty, was still slim and pretty, and Pierre was more than ever her lover, in spite of a great disappointment which he kept shut up in his own heart. He wanted children. His love for them was a passion, but for him stalwart young Joe, now fourteen years old, was the first and the last. Pierre had implicit faith in prayer, and ever since that first summer at Five Fingers he had prayed devoutly that God might send more children.

And God answered, though somewhere there was a slip that puzzled Pierre, for the more he prayed the more children came to Dominique and Marie. First there was a pair of them, Louis and Julie, then three singles as regularly as could be—Aimé and Félipe and Dominique—and with each one of them Marie grew plumper and jollier and began questing about in her head for a name to be given the next.

But Pierre was happy, for if they were not entirely his own there were at least children all about him. Poleon and Sara Dufresne had come with three children and had built their cabin a stone's throw away; Jeremie and Geertruda had a baby, and at the edge of the green bit of meadow which he had pointed out to Josette five years ago were the homes of Jean Croisset and Telesphore Clamart, and Aleck Clamart was courting Anne Croisset. With Pierre he was secretly making plans for a home the following year, after one more season of trapping.

And right at the tip of the evergreen forest, where Pierre had promised, was the little log church in which they gathered each Sunday, and to which Father Albanel, a wandering minister of the forests, came once and sometimes twice a month.

As the population had grown, so had the clearing expanded. There were a good dozen acres or more under careful tillage, and in the open were cattle and several horses, and in every wild meadow for miles about a stack of harvested hay in season. There were chickens and geese and a community flock of turkeys, and at all seasons plenty of eggs and milk and cream and the sweet butter, and the dug-out cellars were filled to the brim with good things to eat when the first cold blasts of winter came. Pierre and Aleck had built a boat, and the six families had combined in the purchase of two nets, so there was no lack of fish either winter or summer at Five Fingers.

For two winters, much against his desire, young Joe had been sent back over the new Canadian Pacific to attend school at Ste. Anne.

Simon McQuarrie made note of all these things with the judgment of a fox and the keenness of a weasel. No one would have judged Simon for what he really was, at least not on short acquaintance. In him was a heart so honest he would have cut off a little finger before taking a mean advantage of any other man or woman. But, as Herman put it, he was always looking around to see what he could pick up. Herman furnished the laughter, the jollity, the never-ending good humor and four-fifths of the stomach of the partnership, and Simon was the ferret who smelled out the dollars; so when Simon said one day, "I never knew a better place than this for a little mill, Herman," the proud grandfather of baby Tobina knew something was in the air.

First of all, with his native shrewdness, Simon took stock of the happiness at Five Fingers. This contentment, the community affection which brought all together like members of one family, was a big asset in the very beginning. The mill itself could be made a sort of family affair, and a boat arranged for twice or three times a year to run up from Duluth or Fort William and carry away the lumber. There was enough fine birch and cedar and spruce right about them to keep going for years, and the mill would bring even greater prosperity than trapping, which was sure to wear out now that the settlements were filling up rapidly along the line of the railroad.

At last he talked over the matter with Pierre, and Pierre called in Dominique, and there was a meeting of all the men-folk of the families at which it was agreed nothing could be finer for Five Fingers than a mill. Simon promised the first thing to be made from its lumber should be a schoolhouse, and they would have to see to it the schoolhouse had a teacher, for if Dominique and Jeremie and Poleon kept up the pace they were going there surely must be teaching at Five Fingers.

This was on Saturday. The next day Father Albanel came, a little, gray-haired, rosy-cheeked man who loved life and all living things, and who had no settled church because he saw in nature a greater God than he had ever been able to find in the Book written by man, a freedom of thought which had been labeled heresy by those who traveled the old and unchangeable paths. But Father Albanel was loved by every man, woman and child who knew him, and while his stricter brethren chanted and prayed in their vaulted cathedrals and little mission houses, his Church was ten thousand square miles of forest land. And on this Sunday Father Albanel prayed that Simon McQuarrie might be able to keep his promises.

So the mill came. There was not much to it, but when on a certain September afternoon a tug and a scow came creeping up the middle inlet every soul in Five Fingers was down to meet them, and every heart was beating with the biggest excitement that had ever come into the lives of Pierre and his people. With the tug came Simon McQuarrie, proud as an admiral in command of a fleet, and with him a Norwegian engineer and his wife, two mill-hands, and a sallow-faced, anemic-looking young man who was to teach Jeremie Poulin's children and Dominique's kindergarten during the winter for fifteen dollars a month and board.

The mill was set up, with only pieces of tarpaulin for roof at first. Axes rang merrily in the woods, and the three horses at Five Fingers dragged in the logs at the ends of chains. Even the women were excited, and the children waited eagerly for the set day when smoke would pour from the tall boiler stack and the saws would begin to hum and grind. This happened on the fifth day, and when at last steam was up, and the long belt began to turn, and the big, shining saw to whirl, there rose a great hurrah, and even Baby Tobina waved her tiny fists and crowed as loudly as she could. Then the sharp teeth of the saw touched the end of the first log, and there came the first of that beautiful, droning song—the song of live steel cutting through sweet wood—which was to last for many years at Five Fingers, and which may be heard at times to this very day.

No one, not even his sweetheart wife, Josette, was permitted to look deeply and completely into the heart of Pierre. As time passed he saw his beloved forest dragged in, a log at a time, to be cut into pieces by that droning, merciless saw. He watched the life's blood of the timber pile up in great golden heaps of sweet-smelling sawdust in which the growing children loved to play, and down on the shore he saw his wilderness garnered in huge piles of boards, waiting for the little black tugs to come in and drag them away. He knew that it was all as it should be, for new prosperity came with the mill, more comforts and happiness for the women and children, and a few more people to Five Fingers. This was progress. Yet an ache was in his heart which he kept to himself, and which would never quite die away. For with a passion next to his love for children he loved his forests, and with him every tree was a word of God.

Yet he would not have changed conditions, for he knew it was himself who was wrong. Everything told him that. Even the wild things seemed to love this more intimate companionship with man, for the birds and squirrels were never more numerous about Five Fingers. They sang and chattered with the music of the mill, ran over the roofs of the houses and built their nests under the eaves, and in winter came to the very doorsteps to eat crumbs and grain thrown out for them. It was Pierre whose word was unwritten law at Five Fingers. One of his laws was that no living thing that was not a pest should ever be harmed near the settlement, and when ice and snow were heavy in the hills and between the ridges deer came out shyly to eat with the cattle.

Pierre went no more on the trap line but attended to the business of the mill, and Josette pleased him by saying this made her happiness complete. In spare hours one could always find children about him, and in the evenings, when the droning of the mill saw had ceased, there were games and races and fun among the sawdust piles, and never a day passed that the home of Pierre and Josette was not filled with childish laughter and the patter of little feet, although the little girl they prayed for never came to bear their name. "But she will," said Pierre, keeping up that undying hope in his heart. "Some day, my Josette, there will come a little girl to be a sister to Joe."

Even Joe, his one child, seemed to be getting farther away from him, for as time passed the boy needed no urging to return to Ste. Anne, but was restless and ill at ease when back home from school, and was excited when the day drew near that would take him from Five Fingers again. He was eighteen when Josette learned his secret, and she laughed softly, and kissed him, and told Pierre so that he would not worry any more. The girl was none other than Marie Antoinette, the beautiful little daughter of Jacques Thiebout, whom they had known years ago on the St. Lawrence. She was a year younger than Joe, and had told him he must wait until she had finished completely with the school of Ste. Anne de la Perade, for that was her ambition, and her father's, too. Then she would come with him to Five Fingers.

Tears of joy filled Pierre's eyes the night Josette whispered the secret to him, for if the little girl they both wanted persisted in not coming they would at least have grandsons and granddaughters to make up for it.

"And it may be this is the answer to my prayers," Pierre said to himself. "For Joe's children will be of our own flesh and blood, and we shall love Marie Antoinette as our own. And as Joe is younger and stronger than Dominique, who is growing fat, I do not see why he should fall behind him in the matter of family."

Few changes came to Five Fingers as the years rolled on. The little mill continued to hum and the axes to ring farther and farther back in the forest, and twice or three times in a season the boat came up with loads of supplies and carried away the lumber.

Not a single year did the stork fail to build his nest somewhere about the sawdust piles. Twice he visited Aleck Clamart, who married Anne Croisset; two little Dutchmen he brought to Geertruda Poulin, and there were nine pairs of feet to shoe in the home of Dominique and Marie when young Joe Gourdon brought Marie Antoinette to Five Fingers as his wife.

The mill did not run that day, for it was a day of feasting and rejoicing, and all the world held no prouder monarch than Joe. Marie Antoinette, tall and slim, with her great dark eyes, her glad smile and her outreaching arms of love for the people who had now become her own, was as sweet and beautiful as his mother had been in the days of her youth. And Pierre, in his joy, found in her a rival, for the children gathered round her in dumb worship, and in her pretty arms Marie Antoinette gathered every one, kissing each in turn, even to bashful Louis, the eldest son of Dominique. And when, in their cabin, she flung those same pretty arms around Josette's neck and called her Mother, Pierre winked hard and went outside to puff at his pipe, for he felt like a boy who wanted to cry.

God had been good to him. God had blessed Five Fingers. In the going down of the sun his eyes rested upon a green slope where no plow had touched and no cabin had been built. Religiously that sacred little plot had been held for the time when death might find its way among them. And death had not come. Gratitude welled up in Pierre's heart and choked him—gratitude and pride and faith, for all this was the handiwork of the great and good God he believed in, the God of his forests, the open, the sun and the sky. And the thought came to him that when at last there was a break in the little green slope it was only right that he should be the first to go, for God had filled his measure to the brim, and it seemed to him he could hear the whisper of a message from the violets and red roses of that little knoll in the setting of the sun.

Marie Antoinette, coming to him so quietly he did not hear, put her little hand in his and whispered, "It is beautiful here, my father!"

[CHAPTER III]

As long as men remain to tell the story of the Inland Seas the great autumn storm of 1900 will not be forgotten. It has been set down as a matter of history, and a hundred tales could be told of the ships that went down and the men who died in those days when the Five Lakes were like five mighty churns, whipping and tossing their waters in maelstroms of destruction.

It was not cold. A part of the time the sun shone brightly, and back in the woods from the Superior shore birds sang, and flowers still bloomed. To Pierre and his people this was of strange and mysterious portent, for though they had seen many storms at Five Fingers there had never been one like this, with that terrific roar of enraged waters against rock walls and birds preening themselves and chirping in the sunshine of the forest.

On the second day Pierre took Josette and Marie Antoinette down to the tip of the wooded peninsula that lay between the Second and Middle Finger that they might see the lake as they had never seen it before. It was fun for the women. The wind choked them at times, and they had to scream to be heard, and it whipped their long hair loose until they were like panting naiads, clinging to Pierre's hands, their eyes shining and their hearts thrilled with the excitement of the adventure. Pierre, laughing, told Josette she was as lovely as a girl with her shining hair all about her in a windblown tangle and her cheeks as pink and soft as Marie Antoinette's. But he was only half heard, for the seas were roaring among the rocks below them like the steady thunder of countless guns.

When they came out of the last rim of sheltering spruce and looked beyond the black and dripping rampart of rock that held back the raging waters Josette clung to him in sudden fear, and Marie Antoinette gave a cry that cut like a knife above the wind.

Pierre's heart went dead and still as he stared gray-faced out to sea. There was a twist on his lips where laughter suddenly died.

Out from the shore lay an entanglement of reef and rock, jutting up like great heads of sea-monsters in the quiet and calm of summer, a resting-place for gulls, and strangely quiet and beautiful at times when the water rippled between them in wide paths of green silver. Through this network of waiting traps ran the channel in which the tug made her way to and from the Middle Finger. But there was no channel today. It was lost in a fury of thundering flood, lashing itself into ribbons, and among the rocks, half a mile from where Pierre and his women stood, a ship was beating herself to pieces.

In his first moment of horror Pierre knew they had come just in time to see the end. She was a schooner of possibly three hundred tons, and had plunged broadside upon the long, low reef which Josette herself had named the Dragon because of the jagged teeth of rock which rose from it like the spines of a huge fin. Her tall masts were gone. A mass of wreckage tangled her deck, and Pierre fancied that even above the roar of the surf he could hear the crash of her rending timbers as she rose and fell in mighty sledge-hammer blows upon the reef. As he waited, struck dumb with horror, the vessel was raised half out of the sea, and when she fell back her stern split asunder and the foaming water engulfed her until only her bow was held up by the projecting spines of the Dragon.

Marie Antoinette cried out again, and her face was waxlike in its fear and horror, for very clearly in that moment they saw a moving figure in the bow of the ship. In an instant the figure was inundated and gone.

Life leaped back into Pierre.

"If any live they may sweep into this pit of the Middle Finger," he shouted. "We must help them." Then he turned to Marie Antoinette and placed his mouth close to her ear. "Go back," he cried. "Go back and bring help as swiftly as you can!"

Scarcely were the words spoken when Marie Antoinette was gone with the quickness of a bird, her long hair streaming about her like a veil as she ran. Pierre looked at Josette. She was not frightened now. Her face was white and calm and her eyes were pools of steady fire. She was looking on death. She could almost hear the cries of death. Her glance met Pierre's, and her lips moved, but he did not hear her words. It was then, looking again toward what little remained of the schooner, that they saw something sweeping in toward them among the nearer reefs. It came swiftly, now almost submerged, then popping up for an instant, and was swept at last upon a rock where the waters split like a mill race at the very edge of the smoother sea that ran through the mouth of the Middle Finger.

"It is a raft," shouted Pierre, "and someone is on it!"

Josette's cry rose shrill and piercing:

"It is a woman!"

They could see the figure flung upon the rock, with a hand clutching at its slippery sides, and Pierre's breath came in a sudden gasp of despair when he saw it was a woman. Her face was a ghost's face in the surf mist, and her drenched hair streamed upon the rock as the water ebbed away. She seemed to see them as they stood at the cliff edge, and Pierre thought he heard her voice rise faintly above the thunder of the water, crying out for her life.

He turned and ran to a ragged break in the cliff and climbed down swiftly to the narrow shore line at the edge of the Finger, shouting for Josette to remain where she was. But Josette was close behind him when he began tearing off his clothes. She was terribly white. Blood streaked one of her soft cheeks where she had stumbled against a sharp-edged rock coming down. But her eyes were filled with a strange and unchanging fire, and she fell upon her knees among the stones to unlace one of Pierre's boots while he freed himself of the other. She looked up at him. A glory of strength shone in her face even as her heart was breaking in its agony. For she knew that Pierre Gourdon, her husband, was going into the pit of death; and she tried to smile, and Pierre kissed her lips swiftly and sprang into the sea.

She stood up straight and watched him as he fought his way through the shore surf toward the seething maelstrom where the woman lay upon the rock. Josette could see her clearly. She could see the water and white spume leaping up about her, reaching for her, thrusting her up and then dragging her back, and almost she prayed that God would take her and cover her completely with the sea so that Pierre might turn back. For a little her courage left her and she called wildly upon Pierre to return, telling him she was his wife and that the woman on the rock was nothing to him. And then the woman who was fighting for her life seemed to look into the eyes of Josette through the distance that separated them—and Josette held out her arms and cried encouragement to her.

All sound but the roar of water was lost to Pierre. He was swimming now, and a hundred forces dragged at his body, beating him one way and then the other, while with all his strength he fought to keep himself in the right direction. He knew what it meant to be carried beyond the rock into that deadly place which they called the Pit. There he would die. He would be pulled down by the undertows, and a little later, when they were done with him, his body would be thrown up at the foot of the cliff. The thought did not fill him with fear. It gave him strength to know Josette was watching him in this struggle against death, and that she was praying for him—and for the woman on the rock.

Only Josette and the other woman could measure the eternity of time it took him to win the fight. In the last moment a mighty hand seemed to gather him in its palm and sweep him up to the rock, and he found himself clinging to it, facing the woman. She was as white as he had seen Josette. Her eyes were as dark, and there was something in them that was more terrible to look at than fear. Pierre was exhausted. He drew himself up a few inches at a time, trying to smile the encouragement he could not speak. His eyes reached the level of the rock, and he looked over and down—and saw then what it was the woman was holding in the crook of her arm.

It was a little girl, six or seven years old, and forgetting in his amazement the thundering menace of the sea Pierre thought that in all his life he had never seen anything so beautiful as this child. She was not hurt. Her eyes were wide open—great, dark eyes that were velvety pools of terror—and her face, lovely as an angel's, looked at him from a mass of jet-black hair that dripped with water and clung about her neck and shoulders like silken strands of seaweed. It was as if a vision had crept up from the foaming surf to taunt him, a vision of a face he had painted in his dreams and had prayed for and hoped for all through the years of his life, and he dashed the water from his eyes to see more clearly. Then he reached down and drew the child to him and held her fragile, slim little body in his arms. The woman's face changed then. Its fierce resolution died out. She became suddenly limp, and seeing her weakness Pierre caught hold of her so that the surf would not beat her from the rock.

"I will get you ashore," he shouted. "You must not give up! You must hold to the rock!"

He bent his face to the child's.

"And you——"

She lay against his breast. Her eyes were looking up at him steadily, and words choked in Pierre's throat. Those eyes, it seemed to him, were too beautiful for a child's eyes. Her lips were still red. But her face was the color of a white cameo in its frame of wonderful black hair, and the thought came to him again that it was an angel the storm had blown in from the sea.

The woman was drawing herself up beside him. Another wave broke against the rock, smothering them in its surf. Out of it came her voice.

"I am Mona Guyon," she cried, so close that her head touched his shoulder. "This is my baby. Her father—went down—there—beside the rock—a few minutes ago. Take her ashore——"

A roaring flood inundated them. When it was gone Pierre drew in a deep breath.

"You must hold to the rock," he shouted again. "I will come back for you. It will be easy—easy for all of us to get ashore—if you will hold to the rock!"

When the roar of the surf died away for a moment he told the child what to do. She must put her arms round his neck and ride ashore on his back and draw in deep breaths whenever her face was out of the water. They would swim to the shore very quickly, and then he would come back for mother. He even laughed as he told her how safely and quickly it could be done. And then he kissed her; there on the rock Pierre Gourdon kissed the soft little mouth he had prayed for so many years, and bowed his head a moment, asking God to help him. Then he lay flat on his face and drew her into just the right place on his back, and when her arms were round his neck he tied her hands tightly together under his chin with a strip which he had torn from his shirt. She could not get away after that. They would go ashore together, one way or the other.

Slowly he lowered himself over the slippery lee of the rock, and again he smiled at Mona Guyon. The hour of his Calvary had come, and his heart beat fiercely with the strength of two praying women as he slipped into the sea with his precious burden. The twisting undercurrents reached out like the tentacles of an octopus and tried to drag him into the doom of the Pit. But it was not Pierre Gourdon alone who was fighting for the right to live. The woman on the rock was fighting for him, and the woman ashore—standing to her waist in the boiling surf—no longer had heart or soul or strength of body, for all had gone to him; and about his neck were the arms of a child that gave to him the courage, not only of those who loved and prayed, but of the good God who had called upon him to play his part in this day and hour.

So he fought, and won at last to the place where his beloved Josette reached out and caught him and helped him to the stony shore, where he sank down weakly, with the child in his arms and her face looking up at him from his breast. He had kept her above the water—that had been the never faltering thought in his mind; and now there seemed to be something of awe, of reverence, of unspoken worship in those strangely beautiful eyes of l'Ange, as Pierre called her in his heart, and suddenly her arms tightened round his neck and with a little cry she kissed him.

Then she was in Josette's arms, and Pierre rose to his feet.

A sudden dread swept over him as he looked out at the rock again. It seemed to him the seas were higher, and the woman was not as he had left her. Her face was down, she was limp, a dark blot without life or resistance, and he saw a huge wave drive up and move her like a sodden chip a little nearer to the edge of the Pit. She was not holding on, as he had prayed God she would! A few more waves like that last one, a taller crest, an angrier thrust from the sea—and she would go.

He turned to Josette. She was on her knees among the sharp stones with her arms about the child, and both she and little Mona were looking up at him, waiting, knowing that only Pierre Gourdon was master of himself and of life and death in this hour. He had never seen such eyes as theirs—Josette's in their agony of fear for him, little Mona's so strangely, gloriously beautiful, saying more to him in their childish terror and entreaty than human lips could have spoken.

"I am going back," he said. "It will be easy this time!"

They heard him above the smashing fury of the Pit, and Pierre, catching an unknown note in his own voice, knew that he was lying. As he faced the beat of the sea he made as if he did not hear Josette calling wildly to him that help would surely come in a few minutes, and he must wait. A few minutes and it would be over, for he could see that with each thrust of the frothing surf over the crest of the rock the woman was a little nearer to death.

It was a harder fight this time. At least it seemed so to Pierre, for the old strength was no longer in his limbs, and something seemed to have gone out of his heart. If he could reach the rock, just reach it and cling to it and hold the woman until Marie Antoinette's message brought the men! That was all he prayed for now, all he hoped for. It was inconceivable for his imagination to go beyond those things—the rock, the woman, a jutting tooth of reef to hang to for their lives. He could feel death all about him as he fought and swam. It struck at him, choked him, blinded him, dragged at his breath until it seemed as if he must give up and go riding with it into the maelstroms of the Pit. It laughed and jeered at him and roared in his ears, but through it all he saw the rock, and at last the same strange current caught him with the force of a gargantuan hand and flung him to it.

He tried to climb up, and slipped back. He tried again and again, and then began to make it, an inch at a time. Something was singing in his ears. It was like the droning hum of the saw in the mill. For a moment he rested. He could not see the top of the rock, but he could see the shore, and there were many figures on it now—men running down to where Josette was again standing waist-deep in the water.

With new courage he pulled himself up, and then he gave a cry—a madman's cry of horror, fear and futile warning. The woman had slipped to the very edge of the rock—the edge that lipped the fury of the Pit. She was half over. And she was slipping—slipping....

He scrambled toward her, flinging himself down the treacherous dip to catch at her long hair. He caught a strand of it, but it pulled away from him—and he thrust himself another foot and buried his fingers in the wet mass of it. In that moment the sea took her. It dragged her down, and Pierre, holding fast to her hair, went with her into the black death of the Pit; and as he went his wide eyes saw once more the blue of the sky and the tops of his beloved forests, and out of his soul came a soundless cry, the faith and gratitude of a man who was not afraid to die, "After all—God has been a long time good to me—Pierre Gourdon!"

Even then, in that roaring baptism of death, his mind was on the woman. It would not do to let her body beat itself among the rocks alone, and in some way—as they were twisted and torn by the rending currents—he got his arms about her. He made no effort to fight, except to hold her. To fight against the forces which had him in their power was impossible. He was like a chip in a boiling pot, twisted and turned, now thrust downward and then up, but never far enough to snatch a breath of air. He felt the blows of the rocks. Then he began going down, until it seemed in the last moment that he was falling swiftly through illimitable space. Consciousness of the woman's presence was gone, but he still held her in his arms.

Only the strong hands of Joe Gourdon and Simon McQuarrie held Josette from joining her husband in the heart of the Pit. She struggled against them, crying out her right to go to him, until they brought her to the narrow rim of beach under the cliff and her eyes fell on little Mona. The wind had blown the child's wet hair back from her face, and a bitter cry came to Josette's lips and resentment burned in her for an instant like a fire. Pierre was gone because of her, because of this beautiful, star-eyed child and the woman! They had taken him from her. And here was the child, living, staring at her with those eyes which had made Pierre call her l'Ange—staring at her—while Pierre—and the other woman—dead and beaten among the rocks.... And then....

"My mother!"

It was the child's voice, two words crying out to her, faint and yearning and filled with agony above the lash of the sea, and with an answering cry Josette fell down sobbing upon her knees and opened her arms and held the little stranger tightly against her breast. For a space after that she was blind to what happened about her. Dominique stood between her and the sea, even as he saw the grim joke which the fiends of the Pit were playing upon them this day. For these fiends were seldom known to give up their playthings, whether logs or sticks or living things. Once he had known them to keep the body of a dog for days, and at another time a strong-limbed buck had died there, and it was a week before they had tired of him and had thrown him ashore. But this day there was a change. Joe Gourdon and Jeremie Poulin and Poleon Dufresne had leaped waist-deep into the surf and were bringing out the bodies of Pierre and the woman!

It was Marie Antoinette who knelt beside them first, and unclasped Pierre's arms from about the woman. And then Josette saw them. She staggered to her feet and ran past Dominique, and the first she looked upon was the white, dead face of the mother. Very tenderly then she took Pierre's head in her arms, and bent her own over it until both their faces were shrouded in her long hair.

"He isn't dead," she whispered. No one heard her, for she was saying it only to herself, and then to Pierre. "He isn't dead. He isn't dead." She repeated the words, swaying her body gently with Pierre, and the others drew back, and Marie Antoinette hid little Mona's face against her while Simon McQuarrie and Telesphore Clamart bore the dead woman between them round the end of the cliff. And Josette kept repeating, "He isn't dead, he isn't dead," and she kissed Pierre's lips, and pressed her cheek against his cheek, and the women and men of Five Fingers stood back and waited, none daring to be first to break in upon these sacred moments which belonged to Josette and her dead.

At last Marie Antoinette came up softly and knelt beside Josette and put a loving hand about her shoulder. Josette's eyes turned to look at her and they were soft and glowing and so strange they frightened Marie Antoinette. "He isn't dead," she was still saying, and she bowed her face down again to Pierre's.

Choking the sob in her throat, Marie Antoinette put her hand to Josette's face—and a great shock ran through her. She had touched Pierre's cheek. She felt with her other hand, and drew back Josette's hair, her heart suddenly throbbing like an Indian drum. Then she saw it was not the madness of grief that kept Josette repeating those words, but the intuition of a soul which had felt the nearness of its mate, for Pierre's eyes slowly opened and the first vision which came to him out of a roaring sea of dreams was the face of his wife.

From the group of tensely waiting people Mona had come, sobbing in a strange, quiet way for her mother, and as Marie Antoinette drew a little back Josette caught the child close to her, along with Pierre, and as Pierre reached his arms up weakly to them both the thought came to him again, "God has been a long time good to me—Pierre Gourdon!"

[CHAPTER IV]

It was the blue jay that mellowed the fear of death in the swiftly beating heart of Peter McRae. He had always been a friend of the blue jays, and this particular bird had perched himself in a spruce top a hundred feet away, screaming defiance at Peter's enemies and telling him to keep up his nerve and not be afraid.

Without going beyond his fourteen-year-old power of reasoning Peter had a strange and abiding faith in the Canadian blue jay tribe. He was a boy's bird, if there ever was one, with his everlasting cocksureness, his persevering courage and his hundred and one little tricks of outlawry and piracy—a bird who was always ready for a fight, never ran away from trouble, and who lived up beautifully to the man-made law, "Do others before others do you." He was a gentleman and a sportsman even if he was a robber and a pest, and Peter loved him.

He could see this particular blue jay very clearly. Shouting voices and the crack of rifles had not frightened him away, and he was making a great commotion in the spruce tops, screaming until it seemed his raucous cries must split his throat. Then, too, there was the cheerful little sapsucker who persisted in pecking for grubs in the end of the big log behind which Peter and his father were hidden, and two newly mated red squirrels who chattered and ran up and down a tree a little farther on, one chasing the other. A big yellow butterfly slowly opened and closed its fan-like wings almost within reach of Peter's hand.

These things kept the madness of utter fear out of the boy's brain. His thin, rather frail face was very white; his blue eyes were round, and staring; his body, not so strong as it should have been, was doubled up behind the log, and his heart throbbed like a hammer inside him—but his courage was not gone. There were no tear stains about his eyes. In one of his hands he clutched a twisted stick.

From the blue jay and the sapsucker and the yellow butterfly his eyes rested upon the face of Donald McRae, his father. That father, so far back as Peter could remember clearly, had been not only a father, but mother and brother and pal as well. "One thing you must live up to all your life, Peter," this father had told him a hundred times, "and that is to be a pal to your own boy when you have one, just as you are now a pal of your dad's. If a dad and his boy are not pals they shouldn't have been born." So they had been that, with no secrets between them except one that had led up to this tragedy of today, and which the boy had not yet begun to understand. All he knew was that for some mysterious reason they were fighting for their lives, and were now sheltered behind a log, and that men a little distance away were watching and waiting to kill them with guns.

The man smiled at him and chuckled in a way Peter loved. But the smile and the chuckle did not hide the flame smoldering deep in his eyes, nor the pallid tenseness of his face, nor the trickle of blood that persisted in running down his cheek and wetting the soft roll of his collar. He was bareheaded and sweaty; his blond hair, very much like Peter's, was wildly disheveled; his hands gripped a gun, and lying on his stomach, he had made himself a loophole by digging leaves and mold from under a crooked elbow in the log. Through this he had watched for his enemies. His grin was chummy and companionable as he turned to Peter.

"Everything all right?" he asked. "Not afraid, are you?"

Peter shook his head. "I'm not much scared."

"Getting hungry?"

"No."

"Thirsty?"

"A little—not much."

The man laughed. He did not feel like laughing. But he laughed, fighting to make it appear natural and unstrained.

"You're a trump, Peter. God knows you're a trump!"

A rifle cracked in the thick fringe of balsams and jack pines a hundred and fifty yards from them, and a bullet struck the log with a sodden chug. The man wiped the blood from his cheek with a handkerchief that was stained red.

"Does it hurt, dad?"

"Nothing but a scratch, Peter."

He put his face to the ground and peered under the log again.

Peter changed his position, uncramped his legs and doubled himself up in another fashion, hugging the earth closely. The blue jay was having a fit, and the sapsucker perked his bright-eyed little head at him not more than a dozen feet away. He could hear a bird singing, and one of the red squirrels was chattering his late afternoon song in a mountain ash tree overhanging the river. Between his knees was a clump of violets.

The log was almost at the edge of the river, which was a swollen flood, and the stream bent itself around like a hairpin, shutting them in on three sides. That was why they were safe, Peter's father had told him. No living thing could swim it to get behind them, and in front of them was a narrow neck of land which was open and clear right up to the thick edge of the swamp a rifle shot away. Across that open no one had dared to come.

A dozen times during the past hour Peter had wished the river was not there, for it held them prisoners even if it did keep their enemies back. Across it, not much farther away than he could have thrown a stone, was a deep, dense forest of primeval darkness, low and swampy, in which he conceived a thousand hiding-places for himself and his father. Peter's mind sometimes traveled beyond his years, and as he looked at the stream, yearning for the safety of the other side, he wondered why the blue jay and the sapsucker and the singing brush sparrow should have wings while they had only legs and arms.

Only wings could carry them over the stream. In the dry months of summer it was not much more than a creek, with sand bars and pebbly shores and polished rocks sticking out of it. Now, in this flood time of spring, it had no shores and was a thing gone mad. It was deep and black, and swept past with a steady, growling roar, eating into the banks on its way, uprooting trees and slashing itself into caldrons of boiling fury where the channel narrowed or where it leaped over the great boulders and rock débris of rapids. From where he crouched Peter could see one of these places a quarter of a mile below, and there the water was not black but white, and leaped and spouted as if huge monsters were churning it. Under ordinary conditions the swollen stream would have lured and fascinated him. It came out of a vast and mysterious Canadian wilderness, and it disappeared into an adventure land of forests equally vast and strange. With it rode many things of interest—huge piles of driftwood, shooting down on the crest of the flood like islands; big logs that sped with the swiftness of monster serpents; and great trees, freshly torn out by the roots, and with their tops trailing and swishing like whips urging on a living thing.

Peter was staring at it when a hand rested itself gently on his head. Donald McRae was watching him, and a slow torture had burned itself like the scar of a living coal in his eyes and face. More than the earth he walked upon and more than the God he believed in, he loved this boy. It was Peter, with his thin, quizzical face, and his mind and courage developed beyond his strength and years, who had made life bearable and joyous for him. As he had worshiped the mother, linking his soul with hers until it had been taken away, so he worshiped this one precious part of her she had left to him. Without Peter....

He choked back the thickness in his throat as he placed his hand on the boy's head. It was a habit with him to talk with Peter at times as if he were a man, and the man-way in which Peter's eyes met his now gave him courage.

"They won't try to cross that open before dark," he said. "They're afraid of us in the light, Peter. But they'll come when it's dark. And we can't wait for them. We've got to get away."

The boy's face brightened. He had a consummate faith in this father of his. He waited, keenly expectant, twisting one of the blue violets between his thin fingers.

"Does the creek frighten you, son?" asked the man.

"It's pretty swift, but I'm not much scared of it."

"Of course not. You wouldn't be your dad's boy, if you were. See that log down there, the big dry one, half in the water?" He pointed, and Peter nodded. "When it begins to get dusk we'll crawl down and take a ride on that. It won't be hard to get away."

For the first time a tremor came in the boy's voice.

"Dad, what are they trying to shoot us for? What have we done?"

Donald McRae made a pretense of peering through his loophole again. He wanted to cry out with the sickness that was in his heart, and in the same voice call down the vengeance of God upon the makers of that grim and merciless law which at last had come to corner and destroy him where he had built his little cabin home in the edge of the wilderness. It was impossible—now—to answer that question of Peter's, "What have we done?"

He raised his head, and faced his boy.

"It's five o'clock. We'd better have a bite to eat. When we take to the water it will spoil our grub."

From the pocket of a coat which lay at his side he took some biscuits and meat. Peter made a sandwich and munched at it, yearning for a little of the black river-water to go with it. When the man had finished he drew from an inside pocket of the same coat a wallet, a pencil and a corked bottle half filled with matches. In the wallet he found a sheet of paper, and on this he wrote for several minutes, after which he folded the sheet of paper very tightly, thrust it into the bottle with the matches, and corked it in securely. Then he gave the bottle to Peter.

"Put that in your pocket," he said, "and remember what I'm telling you now, Peter. We're going to make for a place called Five Fingers. A man lives there whose name is Simon McQuarrie. Don't forget those two—Five Fingers and Simon McQuarrie. What I have written and put in the bottle is for him. If anything should happen to me——" He broke in upon himself with a cheerful laugh. "Of course nothing will happen, Peter, but if it should—you promise to take that bottle to him?"

"I'll take it."

"Where?"

"Five Fingers."

"Who?"

"Simon McQuarrie."

"Right. Now keep watch through this hole while I cut some leather strings out of the tops of my boots. We may need them to harness the log with when we go to sea. Won't they be surprised when they come and find us gone—eh—Peter?"

"You bet they will!" agreed Peter fervently.

Quietly he began watching the open through the hole which his father had made under the log. He breathed a little more tensely, for he realized the deadly importance of his vigil. Yesterday one of his ambitions had been to wear a uniform when he was old enough, one with stripes and brass buttons, and with a big revolver fastened to a cord hung around his neck. He had looked upon the wilderness police with the awe of a youngster who loved romance and adventure. Today he hated them. Only a little while ago he had waited for his father at their cabin, with a good dinner ready for him. Then his father had come, galloping on a horse Peter had never seen before.

"I've had a little trouble with the police, Peter, and we've got to hit into the woods," he had said.

The suddenness of it had taken Peter's breath away. They did not wait to eat any of the dinner he had prepared. Even then the police almost caught them before they reached this log. There were four of them. His father had kept them back with his rifle, and Peter was disappointed in his marksmanship. He was sure he could have done better himself. His father missed every time, even though his bullets did go close enough to make their enemies dodge behind trees. And always before that he had been proud of his father's shooting!

His hand touched the cool barrel of the rifle, and a thrill ran through him. It was a thing he had never felt before. He was sure he would not miss if he could only be given a chance, for he had often hit rabbits at that distance of a hundred and fifty yards, and a man was many times larger than a rabbit. An inch at a time, slowly and carefully so that his father would not notice what he was doing, he poked the barrel of the rifle through the hole. He would be ready, anyway. He had forgotten fear. His blood was hot. His father had always talked to him about playing square, and never taking a mean advantage, and always to fight for women, no matter who they were. Well, there were no women here, but it wasn't playing square when four men came after his father like this. If they would come out, clean and sportsmanlike, one at a time, and fight with fists instead of guns....

"You see, Peter," his father was saying as he cut a thin strip from his boot top, "I couldn't leave you in the cabin alone. I've got to get you down to Five Fingers. If Simon McQuarrie isn't there, you wait for him. And don't show anyone else that paper in the bottle!"

Peter was not listening. His heart had given a sudden terrific jump and was half choking him. In the edge of a clump of dwarf banksians something had moved. And then his father turned—just in time to catch his hand, to stop his finger at the trigger, to drag him back from the hole. Never as long as he lived would he forget the terrible look that had come into his father's face. To hide it Donald McRae leaned over his son and hugged him close to his arms, and for a space the law might have descended upon them without resistance.

From the shelter of the evergreens Corporal Crear of the Provincial Police was looking toward the log. His men were lying close about him.

"We've got to go out and get him when it's dark enough," he said. "Don't shoot unless you have to, but if that happens—shoot straight. Only be sure it's not the kid. That's what puzzles me—why McRae has the kid with him out there behind the log!"

Only Donald McRae and Peter could have solved that mystery for Crear, and even then Crear might not have understood. It was something which belonged entirely to Peter and his father. As they waited for the sun to dip behind the tall evergreen forest across the river, they lay very close together, and their eyes met frequently and their hands and bodies touched.

There was something pathetically doglike in the man's dependence upon his boy. Take Peter away from him and his heart was gone, for Peter was the one thing he had left of a great faith and a great love that would never die. More than once a cold fear had swept over him at the thought of something happening to him, and he had always prayed that if anything did happen, it would come to both at the same time. Even now he would not have sent Peter back to the safety of the cabin. That would have meant dissolution for himself—and strangers and a heartbreaking tragedy of aloneness for Peter.

Across the river there was hope, and a refuge for Peter at Five Fingers with Simon McQuarrie. A woman had put an undying faith in the justness of God in Donald McRae's soul, and always there were two things in his breast, faith and memory of the woman, like stars which no darkness could dim. Their glow lay warmly in his eyes as he saw the courage with which the boy waited for the setting of the sun.

As the long shadows came creeping across the river Peter no longer felt the fear which had made his heart beat so uncomfortably fast. His father's presence and the touch of his hand filled him with an utter confidence. The man even pointed out to him the mysteries of an ant home which they had accidentally destroyed in the log, and told him a story of how once upon a time he had gone down a flooded stream like this, and what fun it had been.

Then the shadows came more swiftly. The sun at last left only a golden glow above the forest. The blue jay and the sapsucker were gone. Out of the woods came the melodious dusk song of many red squirrels. A flock of crows sailed overhead on their way to the evening roosting place. The rush of the river seemed more gentle and lost its menace for Peter. The churning turmoil of the distant rapids was mellowed in a soft mist, and a little later they could not make out clearly the driftwood going down with the stream.

"Now is our time," said Peter's father. "Creep after me, flat on your stomach."

It took them only a minute to reach the big dry log. They could move freely here, for the upward dip of the bank concealed them. Donald McRae did not let Peter guess the tension he was under as he worked. He stood his rifle where the police would easily find it and laughed softly as he tied one end of a stout leather thong about Peter's wrist and the other end about his own. After that he rolled the log into the water and tested it to get its proper balance and tied the other leather thongs to a projecting stub.

"It's just right," he announced cheerfully. "A canoe couldn't have been better built for us, Peter. Are you ready?"

"I'm ready," said Peter.

He was in the water to his knees; now he went in to his waist. It was cold, biting cold; his teeth clicked, but he did not say anything about it. He looped his arms about the stub and through one of the leather thongs, and from the opposite side of the log his father twisted the fingers of one hand tightly in his coat. Then they began to move. His feet lost bottom and the cold water shot up to his armpits, taking his breath away. His father grinned cheerfully at him and he tried to grin back. In a moment they were in the current and the shore began to slip past them with amazing swiftness. It was not unpleasant, except for the icy chill of the water, which seemed to take the place of blood in his veins. There was no resistance against his body; the log carried them buoyantly and smoothly, so that after a little he had courage to look about him.

Their log had swung quickly into mid-stream, and they were overtaking a more slowly moving mass of driftwood. The thought came to Peter that it was like a race. Then something alive caught his eyes on the flotsam. It was a furry, catlike creature with short, perky ears and a fox's face, and he could almost have touched it with his hands when they passed.

"A fisher-cat," said his father. "He will have a nice swim when he hits the rapids!"

Peter was wondering just how much of a chance the fisher-cat had when something drifted against him. It was a drowned porcupine, floating belly up. The porky must have had a nice swim, too!

He shivered. The roar of the rapids was growing, and it was no longer pleasant to hear. The musical cadence which distance had given it was gone, and a sullen, snarling undertone of menace and wrath began to pound at the drums of his ears. In the twilight it looked as though they were racing straight into the mouth of a huge churn out of which milky froth was spouting.

Then two things happened which seemed odd to Peter. The dead porcupine was clinging to the log as if some sort of life held it there, and the fisher-cat's raft of driftwood which they had overtaken and passed was now passing them. To Peter this last was unaccountable, but to Donald McRae, who understood the whims and caprices of flood currents, there was no mystery about it. For a moment the fisher-cat seemed about to make a leap for the log. Then he huddled back and disappeared with his raft in the rougher water that preceded the gray wall of spume.

The man's hand tightened its hold on Peter.

"Hang on and don't get scared," he cried. "We'll go through this like a rubber ball!"

That was the last Peter heard of his voice, and suddenly his father's face was blotted out from his vision. A huge mouth opened and engulfed them. He could feel himself going down it, with roaring gloom and mighty explosions of water bursting itself against great rocks all about him. For a space which seemed an eternity he gave himself up for lost, and he wanted to scream out to his father. But the water smothered him. It thrust him under, buried him, then tossed him up to breathe. He hung on, as his father had told him, and after three or four minutes which were so many hours to him he could breathe easier and the roaring grew less.

They had come through a half-mile of the rapids then. The last of the rocks snapped at them, like growling dogs at their heels, and suddenly the water grew deep and smooth where it swung shoreward in a great eddy. For the first time Peter felt a hurt. It was his father's hand, holding him in a grip that only death could have broken. And then he saw his father's face. Donald McRae was gasping for breath. Even Peter would never know the fight he had made to keep the log running right during those three or four minutes in the rapids.

Slowly the current brought them to the shore. It was the shore they wanted, too, with its deep evergreen forests and its hundreds of miles of untrailed hiding-places. The big pool was dotted with drifting masses of débris. One of these, very near to them, Peter was sure he recognized. But the fisher-cat was no longer on it.

He was terribly cold, and when at last his father brought the end of the log to the shore and helped him out to dry ground the boy fell down in a sodden heap. He was ashamed of himself and tried to get up.

Donald McRae took one of his hands.

"You must walk, Peter—run if you can. Come on!"

He almost dragged him into the darkness of the forest, and Peter began to use his legs. It made him feel better. But his teeth chattered and his body shook as if he had the ague. Two or three hundred yards in the shelter of the timber they came to an overturned spruce tree, and near this was a birch with festoons of loose bark hanging from it.

Donald McRae stripped off an armful of the bark, and one of Peter's blue hands fished out the precious bottle of matches from his pocket. Very soon the flames were leaping up joyously, and he felt their warmth entering into his body. He helped to gather wood. In a quarter of an hour there was a glow in his face, and the big backlog of pitch-filled cedar was a flaming furnace. Darkness settled heavily in the forest, and he was no longer afraid or uncomfortable as he continued to dry his clothes. His father, in a period between wood-gathering, cleaned his pipe and began to dry out some of his soaked tobacco. That was cheerful and inspiring. It always seemed chummier and more homelike to Peter when his father was smoking his pipe.

Later they broke off cedar and balsam boughs until they had a soft bed two feet deep within the warmth of the fire. When the last thread in his clothing was dry Peter crept into this bed. He had no idea of sleeping but made himself a comfortable nest and sat bright-eyed and watchful while his father rested with his back against the log and smoked.

A hundred times they had made camps together that were very much like this one. On hunting and fishing expeditions, and when berries were ripe, and on the trap lines, they had slept out many nights with boughs for a bed. But there had never been the thrill of tonight. The cumulative significance of what had happened was just beginning to find itself in Peter's head. This night was different from all other nights. The darkness which had gathered heavily about them was different, the fire did not seem as friendly, and his father, smoking his pipe, was changed. Always in their adventuring they had been in quest of something—fish or venison, berries or fur. Now something was after them. It was this slow process of mental and physical change from the hunter into the hunted, and its understanding, that was creeping into Peter's soul.

He loved night with its mystery of darkness, its stars and its moon, but now he could feel and hear it breathing secret plottings and danger. When the fire crackled too loudly or its flames leaped too high he shivered, fearing it would betray them. He wondered why his father remained in the light now that they were warm and dry, for there were safer hiding-places in the great pits of gloom that encompassed them. But he said nothing, feeling strangely that even to voice fear would bring reality upon them.

He watched his father, and the brightness in his eyes—something new and strange that lay in them—was like a stab to Donald McRae. In this hour he saw the boy's soul changing. Peter, at last, was beginning to build up the truth. Something terrible must have happened—somewhere—or the police would not be after his father. He had believed the police were omniscient, that they hunted only bad people. That was what they were for—to shut bad people in prisons, or hang them, or shoot them. And they were after his father!

The man saw these things in Peter's eyes and in his pale, thin face. And suddenly a revulsion of horror and of rage swept over Peter. If the police said his father was bad they were liars. He hated them, and if the chance came to him he would get even with them. He would beat out their lives with a club. He would kill them—if they didn't leave his father alone!

He said nothing. But he got out of his nest in the evergreen boughs and sat close to his father against the log, and Donald McRae put his arm around him and puffed hard at his pipe to keep the firelight from revealing what was in his eyes. The world might be against him, but Peter would be like this, his friend and pal to the last. He knew it, and thanked God.

[CHAPTER V]

Peter did not know when he fell asleep. He was buried in the sweet-scented cedar and balsam when his father awakened him. He sat up and rubbed his eyes, and it came to him quickly where he was. The fire was out and dawn was breaking up the gloom of the forest. He missed the fire, and the bacon frying over it, and the pot of coffee steaming in the coals. Those were the usual things that greeted him when he woke up in camp. And this morning he was hungry.

They headed straight into the heart of the unexplored timberlands south and west, and with empty hands and no pack on his back Donald McRae talked as cheerfully as though they had a week's rations with them. But his eyes were constantly questing for something to eat, and it occurred to him as a sort of tragedy that he had not tied his rifle to the log. He did not explain to Peter just why he had left it where the police would easily find it.

By midday their hunt for food had become a thrilling adventure to Peter. It stirred his blood even more than thought of their enemies, for the police seemed an interminable distance away now, shut out by miles of wilderness. There was something fascinating about it, too. There were birds about them and rabbit runways in every dip and swamp they came to, and deer and moose and caribou tracks so plentiful in places that they made trails like the hoof-beaten paths of cattle.

But there was nothing they could get at, except porcupines. During the morning they could have killed half a dozen of these animals with clubs, but each time porcupine flesh was suggested for dinner Peter made a grimace of revulsion. Twice they had tried it experimentally on their camping trips and both times it had nauseated him. He insisted he would rather starve than eat any more of that ill-smelling, fatty stuff the porcupine was made of. He would chew spruce gum instead. There was plenty of it on the trees they passed.

"If you get too hungry we'll roast some lily roots," said Donald, "but if you can hold out until night we'll have the feast of our lives."

Peter held out. The sun was still up when they came from heavy timber into a long, narrow meadow running into a swamp on the other side. This was the sort of place Donald McRae had been looking for. In the edge of the swamp were rabbit runways beaten fresh and hard. They chose the site for their camp in the rim of the high timber, and while Peter brought in firewood Donald made snares from another section of boot top. These he set in the runways. It was scarcely more than dusk when the first big snowshoe ran his head through a noose and found himself swinging at the end of a sapling. An hour later he was roasted, and in the light of their fire they divided the feast between them. Peter didn't mind the absence of salt and bread and potatoes. Nothing he could remember had ever tasted quite so good to him as the unseasoned rabbit.

Food and the warmth of the fire made him drowsy, and very soon after they had finished their supper Donald tucked him snugly into the bed of evergreens they had made and covered him with his coat. Peter fell asleep instantly, and for several minutes the man remained on his knees at his side, the smile of tenderness in his face changing slowly into a look of haggard grief. When he rose to his feet the luster had died out of his eyes and years had fallen upon his shoulders. He caught his breath sobbingly as he stared into the wall of chaotic darkness beyond the firelight. It was only Peter who counted now, and this night was the last Peter would be with him. Tomorrow he would be alone, an outlaw, a hunted man running away to save his life. And Peter....

A moan came to his lips, a dry and broken cry of hopelessness, and his eyes fixed themselves in their anguish upon the heart of the fire. Without Peter, would God give him strength to live? What would the days be like—and the nights—and the months and years to come without Peter? For Peter was not only Peter. In taking the mother, God had given her soul back to him in the body of her boy. She was a part of him, speaking with his voice, looking out of his eyes, loving with his love, a comrade and pal to the man in spirit even as she had been in her own sweet life. And now—tomorrow—he would lose them both. The law was after him. Its hounds would follow him from hole to hole, like foxes after a rabbit, and probably in the end they would get him.

He closed his eyes to shut out the thing that was hurting him. When he opened them a face seemed to have taken form in the glow of the fire like a soul come to give him courage and resolution, sweetly sad in its inspiration, glorious in its consolation and cheer. Every day through the years this visioning of his wife had come to him; through those years she had walked hand in hand with him, she had been with him in the upgrowing of Peter, had helped to teach him the love of God and the glory of nature, and had laughed and cried and sung with them as sunshine and shadow came. And always, in the darkest hours, Donald McRae saw her face, sweet and strong and never afraid. And so it was tonight.

"This is your last great fight for our Peter," her eyes seemed to say to him. "You must be strong."

And then she was gone. Slowly the fire died out, and he put no more wood upon it, but sat motionless and silent until it was only a red glow of ember and ash.

He did not sleep. The moon rose and the clear sky above was filled with stars. In their light he walked back and forth in the open, a solitary figure with a thousand still shadows about him. It was the sort of night he loved, a spring night breathing and whispering of summer and sweet with the perfumes of balsam and spruce and growing things under his feet. These things were a part of his God, and of Peter's God. Just as the woman had built up his faith in him, pointing out its truth and beauty and glory, so had he built up in Peter an illimitable faith in this God which was nature. It strengthened him now. The glow of the moon, the softness of the stars, the gentle whisperings of the wind, the low music of running water and the thrill and tremble of inanimate and voiceless life about him were a part of his religion.

"Love a tree and you love God," had been his text for Peter. And as long as there remained trees and flowers and the songs of birds and eyes and ears with which to see and hear, hope could never die. His brain cleared and his heart grew stronger as he paced more swiftly through the moonlight. The world was gloriously big, he told himself again and again. Somewhere in it was a place for him and Peter, and when he found it, far away from the menace of the law, Peter would not fail to come when he called. But tomorrow he must be strong enough to lie and strong enough to leave Peter at Five Fingers with Simon McQuarrie.

Toward dawn he built up the fire and cooked another rabbit which he caught in one of the snares. It was ready when Peter crawled out of his balsam bed. He did not know his father had not slept during the night. Donald McRae began to whistle when he saw the boy was awake, and though an uncomfortable thickening, persisted in his throat he fought to make the whistling cheerful just the same.

He announced his plan to Peter as if it were born of sudden inspiration and happily solved a temporary problem for them. He told him about Five Fingers and their old friend, Simon McQuarrie. Peter could just remember the Scotchman and Simon's fat Dutch partner and friend, Herman Vogelaar. Donald McRae seemed to recall them now with great pleasure, and he was sure Peter would enjoy his little visit with them, especially as there were several boys and girls of his own age to play with at Five Fingers. Of course he would come back soon, and maybe they would live at Five Fingers, if Peter liked it there. He continued to build up the lie, but something of trouble remained deep back in the boy's eyes. Donald tried not to see it too much, for it was the look he would have seen in the woman's eyes, if she had been in Peter's place.

They traveled until noon and ate their lunch. The afternoon was well gone when they heard the striking of an axe ahead of them. A quarter of an hour later they could hear several axes, and the distant crash of a falling tree. Donald McRae steeled his heart, and stopped. Yet in this moment he was smiling.

"That is Five Fingers," he said. "Can you go on alone, Peter?"

Peter nodded. "But I don't want to," he said. "I want to go with you, dad."

"You must go to Five Fingers, Peter. I'll come back soon. I promise that. I'll come back—soon."

A gulp came in Peter's throat.

"I'm not tired. I can go a long ways yet, dad. I'd rather go with you."

The man drew him into his arms.

"I'll come back tomorrow," he lied, fighting to speak the words calmly. "And you must get the paper in the bottle to Simon McQuarrie as soon as you can. You aren't afraid to go alone, are you, Peter?"

"No, I'm not afraid."

"Then—you must go." He hugged him close for a moment, and rested his cheek on Peter's disheveled hair. "Maybe I'll come back tonight," he whispered desperately. "Good-by, little pal. Hurry—and give Simon the paper—and—good-by!"

His lips burned against Peter's forehead. It was that kiss which startled Peter, and when his father turned away, and then looked back, smiling and waving a hand, a suffocating feeling remained in Peter's heart as if he could not get all the air he wanted to breathe. He tried to wave his hand in response, but in a moment it fell limply to his side. Donald McRae saw the gesture and a sob came in his breath. He disappeared behind a windfall, stopped and looked back. Peter was slowly turning toward Five Fingers. The small figure was pathetic in its aloneness. Twice it paused and turned, and then went on, and was hidden at last by a screen of evergreens.

"God be with you and care for you, Peter, and give me strength to bear this parting," sobbed Donald McRae.

With white and haggard face he turned into the North.

[CHAPTER VI]

Beyond the thicket of young jack pines Peter did not hurry. His feet dragged, and he listened, hoping he would hear his father's voice calling him back. In half an hour he did not travel far beyond the evergreens. Then he knew his father was gone. He continued in the direction of Five Fingers, recalling his promises. Tonight or tomorrow his father would return. He hoped it would be tonight, for there was a lump in his throat which he could not get rid of, and something in his heart which frightened him with suspicions and fears which he was too young to analyze. But he knew his father would not lie. He would come back. He wondered what was written on the paper he was taking to Simon McQuarrie. Probably it told about the wickedness of the police, and Simon would help in some way. Other questions came into his mind now that he was alone. Why hadn't his father gone on to Five Fingers with him?

The chopping of the axes had ceased, but he knew he was heading in the right direction. He came into openings filled with the stumps of trees that had been cut down, and these clearings were carpeted with white and pink spring flowers and masses of violets. He had never seen such beautiful violets, or so many birds at this season of the year. There were robins and thrushes and dozens of little warblers and brush sparrows, and the cutting down of trees seemed to have brought all the sapsuckers and woodpeckers and gaudily colored blue jays in the woods. The sun was delightfully warm, too, though in another hour it would be settling behind the tree tops. In this glory of peace and quiet he proceeded quietly and cautiously, for his father had taught him always to do that in the forest. So he came without sound of footfall or crackling brush to the edge of a little opening beyond a thicket of poplars and birch, and here he stopped suddenly and his heart jumped up into his mouth.

Standing in a warm pool of sunlight not twenty feet away from his concealment was a young girl. She was almost as tall as Peter and so lovely to look upon that he stared at her in amazement and admiration. He thought she had seen him, and his first vision was of her face and a pair of beautiful dark eyes, laughing up at a red squirrel, chattering in a tree top a few paces away. Then she sat down, gathering her flowers about her, and eyes and face were lost to him in a mass of shining, black hair that fell quickly about her, almost touching the ground she was seated upon.

At first he was astonished. Then timidity and fear crept upon him and he wanted to steal away as quietly as he had come. He drew back a step and was preparing for the next when an unexpected interruption rooted him to the spot. The wild and agonized yelping of a dog came from the thick brush beyond the girl. Instantly she was on her feet, her slim body quivering with the tension in which she waited. And then she called, "Buddy—Buddy—come here!"

With a series of pain-filled yelps the creature called Buddy responded. He darted out of the brush and came like a streak across the open. It seemed to Peter the half-grown pup was all legs and head and tail, and that from the sounds he made he must be mortally hurt. Whimpering and crying, he cringed at the girl's feet and kissed the hand she reached down to him. But she did not look at him. She had dropped her flowers and her attitude was fierce and expectant as she waited.

Peter could see the bushes moving across the open and in a moment a boy burst through them. He was half again as big as Peter, and he had a stick in his hand. He followed the dog, half running, and Peter began to hate him as he came. "Any person who will strike a dog should never have been born," his father had taught him from the beginning; and this boy with his thick red face and hulking body had been beating the pup. He was panting triumph when he came up, and the pup slunk closer between the feet of his mistress. The pursuer was at least two years older than Peter. He had thick hands and little eyes and a bullet head, and his eyes were glowing with wickedness.

For an instant Peter saw the girl's eyes. They were dark pools of flaming fire. Then like a little tigress she was at the other. Her hands struck at his face and for a moment the bully was caught at a disadvantage. He dropped his stick and caught her in his arms. His hands buried themselves in her hair, and Peter saw her blows becoming more and more futile. The pup snarled and darted in at the boy's feet. A kick sent him back howling.

Horror and rage possessed Peter when he saw the girl's head thrust backward, and without a sound he ran out of his cover and caught her assailant by the throat. Then, when the girl was freed, he struck. That was another thing his father had taught him, to fight when it was necessary to fight—and always for a woman. His fists struck hard and furiously, and he heard a bellow of alarm and pain from the bully.

The older boy stumbled and fell, and Peter was on him like a cat. He realized this was no time to "play the game fair." They rolled and twisted on the ground, and blood streamed from the bully's nose and mouth. Once Peter saw the girl. She was standing very near, her lips parted, her wonderful eyes shining at him. That glimpse of her was a mighty encouragement. He fought harder, driving his fists home, and kicking. Then they were on their feet again.

It was the bully who renewed the battle. Mauled and bleeding, he had recovered from the surprise attack and his greater bulk and weight began to tell. Exhausted by two days and nights of hunger and flight, Peter felt his strength going. He went down, and the bully flung himself upon him. It was then Peter caught a second glimpse of the girl. She had caught up the stick and was standing over them. He could hear the stick as it struck blow after blow, and his enemy rolled over, half stunned. They were both at the bully then, Peter with his fists and the girl with her stick, and the older boy took to his heels in a wild flight for the safety of the thicket out of which he had come a few minutes before.

Peter wiped his nose and mouth with his sleeve and gasped hard to get his breath. The girl was breathing hard, too, and she was looking at him with such wonder and gladness in her eyes that he wished he was back in the timber again. Then she came to him and began nursing his face with a soft handkerchief, and said things which he could not remember afterward, and Buddy the pup jumped up against him, wagging his knotty tail and licking his hand.

Peter drew back and tried to grin. For a moment he had felt enormously uncomfortable in the presence of this lovely little goddess of the woods, with her soft handkerchief dabbing at his face. Now his old cheer returned. He was glad the fight was over and was strongly conscious that the girl had played no small part in the final victory.

So he said apologetically, "He'd got me if you hadn't come in with the stick."