He unloaded his pack and drew from it a jackpine torch, dried in his cabin and heavy with pitch.  Shortly the flare of this torch lighted up their refuge for a dozen paces about them.  In the illumination of it, moving it from place to place, he gathered dry fire wood and with his axe cut down green spruce for the smouldering back-fire that would last until morning.  By the time the torch had consumed itself the fire was burning, and where Jolly Roger had scraped away the snow from the thick carpet of spruce needles underfoot he piled a thick mass of balsam boughs, and in the center of the bed he buried himself, wrapped warmly in his blankets, and with Peter snuggled close at his side.

Through dark hours the green spruce fire burned slowly and steadily.  For a long time there was wailing of wind out in the open.  But at last it died away, and utter stillness filled the world.  No life moved in these hours which followed the giving up of the big storm’s last gasping breath.  Slowly the sky cleared.  Here and there a star burned through.  But Jolly Roger and Peter, deep in the sleep of exhaustion, knew nothing of the change.

CHAPTER XVI

It was Peter who roused Jolly Roger many hours later; Peter nosing about the still burning embers of the fire, and at last muzzling his master’s face with increasing anxiety.  McKay sat up out of his nest of balsam boughs and blankets and caught the bright glint of sunlight through the treetops.  He rubbed his eyes and stared again to make sure.  Then he looked at his watch.  It was ten o’clock and peering in the direction of the open he saw the white edge of it glistening in the unclouded blaze of a sun.  It was the first sun—­ the first real sun—­he had seen for many days, and with Peter he went to the rim of the barren a hundred yards distant.  He wanted to shout.  As far as he could see the white plain was ablaze with eye-blinding light, and never had the sky at Cragg’s Ridge been clearer than the sky that was over him now.

He returned to the fire, singing.  Back through the months leapt Peter’s memory to the time when his master had sung like that.  It was in Indian Tom’s cabin, with Cragg’s Ridge just beyond the creek, and it was in those days before Terence Cassidy had come to drive them to another hiding place; in the happy days of Nada’s visits and of their trysts under the Ridge, when even the little gray mother mouse lived in a paradise with her nest of babies in the box on their cabin shelf.  He had almost forgotten but it came back to him now.  It was the old Jolly Roger—­the old master come to life again.

In the clear stillness of the morning one might have heard that shouting song half a mile away.  But McKay was no longer afraid.  As the storm seemed to have cleaned the world so the sun cleared his soul of its last shadow of doubt.  It was not merely an omen or a promise, but for him proclaimed a certainty.  God was with him.  Life was with him.  His world was opening its arms to him again—­ and he sang as if Nada was only a mile away from him instead of a thousand.