McKay stood looking back at the pale glow of light in the cabin.

“Something happened there tonight—­something she wouldn’t tell me about,” he said, speaking half to Peter and half to himself.  “I could feel it.  I wish I could have seen her face.”

He set out over the plain; and then, as if remembering that he must explain the matter to Peter, he said: 

“She can’t get out tonight, Pied-Bot, but she’ll come to us in the jackpines tomorrow afternoon.  We’ll have to wait”

He tried to say the thing cheerfully, but between this night and tomorrow afternoon seemed an interminable time, now that he was determined to make a clean breast of his affairs to Nada, and leave the country.  Most of that night he walked in the coolness of the moonlit plain, and for a long time he sat amid the flower-scented shadows of the trysting-place in the heart of the jackpine clump, where Nada had a hidden place all her own.  It was here that Peter discovered something which Jolly Roger could not see in the deep shadows, a bundle warm and soft and sweet with the presence of Nada herself.  It was hidden under a clump of young banksians, very carefully hidden, and tucked about with grass and evergreen boughs.  When McKay left the jackpines he wondered why it was that Peter showed no inclination to follow him until he was urged.

They did not return to the Stew-Kettle until dawn, and most of that day Jolly Roger spent in sleep between the two big rocks.  It was late afternoon when they made their last meal.  In this farewell hour McKay climbed up close to the pinnacle, where he smoked his pipe and measured the shadows of the declining sun until it was time to leave for the jackpines.

Retracing his steps to the hiding place under Gog and Magog he looked for Peter.  But Peter’s sand-wallow was empty, and Peter was gone.

CHAPTER VII

Peter was on his way to the mystery of the bundle he had found in the jackpines.

At the foot of the ridge, where the green plain fought with the blighting edge of the Stew-Kettle, he stood for many minutes before he started east-ward.  With keen eyes gleaming behind his mop of scraggly face-bristles he critically surveyed both land and air, and then, with the slight limp in his gait which would always remain as a mark of Jed Hawkins’ brutality, he trotted deliberately in the direction of the whiskey-runner’s cabin home.

A bitter memory of Jed Hawkins flattened his ears when he came near the rock-cluttered coulee in which he had fought for Nada, and had suffered his broken bones, and today—­even as he obeyed the instinctive caution to stop and listen—­Jed Hawkins himself came out of the mouth of the coulee, bearing a brown jug in one hand and a thick cudgel in the other.  His one wicked eye gleamed in the waning sun.  His lean and scraggly face was alight with a sinister exultation as he paused for a moment close to the rock behind which Peter was hidden, and Peter’s fangs lay bare and his body trembled while the man stood there.  Then he moved on, and Peter did not stir, but waited until the jug and the cudgel and the man were out of sight.