He straightened his shoulders, as if to give himself confidence and strength, and then he called Peter, and comforted the dog whose master and mistress were fleeing through the dark.

“They have reached the pool,” he said, seating himself and holding Peter’s shaggy head between his hands.  “They have just about reached the pool, and Breault must be entering the clearing on the other side.  Roger cannot miss the canoe—­twenty paces down and with nothing to shadow it overhead; I think he has found it by this time, and in another half minute they will be off.  And it is very black down the Burntwood, with deep timber close to the water, and for many miles no man can follow by night along its shores.  “Suddenly his hands tightened, and the Leaf Bud, watching him slyly, saw the last of suspense go out of his face.  “And now—­ they are safe,” he cried exultantly.  “They must be on their way—­ and Breault has not come across the clearing!”

He rose to his feet, and began pacing back and forth, while Peter sniffed yearningly at the door again.  Oosimisk, with the caution of her race in moments of danger, was drawing the curtains at the windows, and Father John smiled his approbation.  He did not want Breault, the man-hunter, peering through one of the windows at him.  Even as he walked back and forth he listened intently for Breault’s footsteps.  Peter, with a sigh, gave up his scratching and settled himself on his haunches close to Nada’s door.

Father John, in passing him, paused to lay a hand on his head.

“Some day it may please God to let us go to them,” he consoled, speaking for himself even more than for Peter.  “Some day, when they are far away—­and safe.”

He felt Peter suddenly stiffen under his hand, and from the Leaf Bud came a low, swift word of warning.

She began singing softly, and dishes and pans already clean rattled under her hands in the kitchen, and she continued to sing even as the cabin door opened and Breault the man-hunter stood in it.

The unexpectedness of his appearance, without the sound of a warning footstep outside, was amazing even to Peter.  In the open door he stood for a moment, his thin, ferret-like face standing out against the black background of the night, and his strange eyes, apparently half closed yet bright as diamonds, sweeping the interior without effort but with the quickness of lightning.

There was something deadly and foreboding about him as he stood here, and Peter growled low in his throat.  Recognition flashed upon him in an instant.  It was the man of the snow-dune, away up on the Barren, the man whom he had mistrusted from the beginning, and from whom they had fled into the face of the Big Storm months ago.  His mind worked swiftly, even as swiftly as Breault’s in its way, and without any process of reasoning he sensed menace and enmity in this man’s appearance, and associated with it the mysterious flight of Jolly Roger and Nada.