For a space his heart leapt up; and then, as if discovery of the usurper in her room had come, a cloud swept over the face of the moon like a mighty hand and darkness crowded him in.  But the cloud sailed on and the light drove out the gloom again.  Then it was that Jolly Roger saw the Old Man in the Moon was up and awake tonight, for never had he seen his face more clearly.  Often had Nada pointed it out to him in her adorable faith that the Old Man loved her, telling him how this feature changed and that feature changed, how sometimes the Old Man looked sick and at others well, and how there were times when he smiled and was happy and other times when he was sad and stern and sat there in his castle in the sky sunk in a mysterious grief which she could not understand.

“And always I can tell whether I’m going to be glad or sorry by the look of the Man in the Moon,” she had said to him.  “He looks down and tells me even when the clouds are thick and he can only peep through now and then.  And he knows a lot about you, Mister—­ Jolly Roger—­because I’ve told him everything.”

Very quietly Jolly Roger got up from the bed and very strange seemed his manner to Peter as he walked through the outer room and into the night beyond.  There he stood making no sound or movement, like one of the lifeless stubs left by fire; and Peter looked up, as his master was looking, trying to make out what it was he saw in the sky.  And nothing was there—­nothing that he had not seen many times before; a billion stars, and the moon riding King among them all, and fleecy clouds as if made of web, and stillness, a great stillness that was like sleep in the lap of the world.

For a little Jolly Roger was silent and then Peter heard him saying,

“Yellow Bird was right—­again.  She said we’d find a black world down here and we’ve found it.  And we’re going to find Nada where she told us we’d find her, in that place she called The Country Beyond—­the country beyond the forests, beyond the tall trees and the big swamps, beyond everything we’ve ever known of the wild and open spaces; the country where God lives in churches on Sunday and where people would laugh at some of our queer notions, Pied-Bot.  It’s there we’ll find Nada, driven out by the fire, and waiting for us now in the settlements.”

He spoke with a strange and quiet conviction, the haggard look dying out of his face as he stared up into the splendor of the sky.

And then he said.

“We won’t sleep tonight, Peter.  We’ll travel with the moon.”

Half an hour later, as the lonely figures of man and dog headed for the first settlement a dozen miles away, there seemed to come for an instant the flash of a satisfied smile in the face of the Man in the sky.

CHAPTER XVII