From the cabin McKay went first to the great rock that jutted from the broken shoulder of Cragg’s Ridge, and as they stood there Peter heard the strange something that was like a laugh, and yet was not a laugh, on his master’s lips.  But his scraggly face did not look up.  There was an answering whimper in his throat.  He had been slow in sensing the significance of the mysterious thing that had changed his old home since months ago.  During the hours of afternoon, and these moonlit hours that followed, he tried to understand.  He knew this was home.  Yet the green grass was gone, and a million trees had changed into blackened stubs.  The world was no longer shut in by deep forests.  And Cragg’s Ridge was naked where he and Nada had romped in sunshine and flowers, and out of it all rose the mucky death-smell of the flame-swept earth.  These things he understood, in his dog way.  But what he could not understand clearly was why Nada was not in the cabin, and why they did not find her, even though the world was changed.

He sat back on his haunches, and Jolly Roger heard again the whimpering grief in his throat.  It comforted the man to know that Peter remembered, and he was not alone in his desolation.  Gently he placed a soot-grimed hand on his comrade’s head.

“Peter, it was from this rock—­right where we’re standing now—­ that I first saw her, a long time ago,” he said, a bit of forced cheer breaking through the huskiness of his voice.  “Remember the little jackpine clump down there?  You climbed up onto her lap, a little know-nothing thing, and you pawed in her loose curls, and growled so fiercely I could hear you.  And when I made a noise, and she looked up, I thought she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen—­just a kid, with those eyes like the flowers, and her hair shining in the sun, an’ tear stains on her cheeks.  Tear stains, Pied-Bot—­because of that snake who’s dead over there.  Remember how you growled at me, Peter?”

Peter wriggled an answer.

“That was the beginning,” said Jolly Roger, “and this—­looks like the end.  But—­”

He clenched his fists, and there was a sudden fierceness in the grotesque movement of his shadow on the rock.

“We’re going to find her before that end comes,” he added defiantly.  “We’re going to find her, Pied-Bot, even if it takes us to the settlements—­right up into the face of the law.”

He set out over the rocks, his boots making hollow sounds in the deadness of the world about them.  Again he followed where once had been the trail that led to Mooney’s shack, over on the wobbly line of rail that rambled for eighty miles into the wilderness from Fort William.  The P. D. & W. it was named—­Port Arthur, Duluth & Western; but it had never reached Duluth, and there were those who had nicknamed it Poverty, Destruction & Want.  Many times Jolly Roger had laughed at the queer stories Nada told him about it; how a wrecking outfit was always carried