Breault was tired, but his eyes lighted up when he saw the footprints in the sand, and he chuckled—­almost good humoredly.  As a matter of fact he was in a good humor.  But one would not have reckoned it as such in Breault.  A hard man, the forests called him; a man with the hunting instincts of the fox and the wolf and the merciless persistency of the weazel—­a man who lived his code to the last letter of the law, without pity and without favoritism.  At least so he was judged, and his hard, narrow eyes, his thin lips and his cynically lined face seldom betrayed the better thoughts within him, if he possessed any at all.  In the Service he was regarded as a humanly perfect mechanism, a bit of machinery that never failed, the dreaded Nemesis to be set on the trail of a wrong-doer when all others had failed.

But this morning, with every bone and muscle in him aching from his long night of tedious exertion, the chuckle grew into a laugh as he looked upon the telltale signs in the sand.

He stretched himself and his tired bones cracked.

Breault did not think aloud.  But he was saying to himself.

“There, against that rock, Jolly Roger McKay sat There is the imprint of only one person sitting.  The girl was in his arms.  Here are little holes where her outstretched heels rested in the sand.  She is wearing shoes and not moccasins.”

He grinned as he drew his service pack from the two-log cedar raft.

“Plenty of time now,” he continued to think.  “They are mine this time—­sure.  They believe they have fooled me, and they haven’t.  That’s fatal.  Always.”

Not infrequently, when entirely alone, Breault let a little part of himself loose, as if freeing a prisoner from bondage for a short time.  For instance, he whistled.  It was not an unpleasant whistle, but rather oddly reminiscent of tender things he remembered away back somewhere; and as he fried his bacon and steamed a handful of desiccated potatoes he hummed a song, also rather pleasant to ears that were as closely attentive as Peter’s.

For Peter had crept up through a tangle of ground-scrub and lay not twenty paces away, smelling of the bacon hungrily, and watching intently from his concealment.

Peter knew the fox and the wolf, but he did not know Breault, and he did not guess why the man’s whistling grew a little louder, nor why his humming voice grew stronger.  But after a time, with his back and not his face toward Peter, Breault called in the most natural and matter-of-fact voice in the world,

“Come on, Peter.  Breakfast is ready!”

Peter’s jaws dropped in amazement.  And as Breault turned toward him, his thin face a-grin, and continued to invite him in a most companionable way, he forgot his concealment entirely and stood up straight, ready either to fight or fly.

Breault tossed him a dripping slice of bacon which he held in his hand.  It fell within a foot of Peter’s nose, and Peter was ravenously hungry.  The delicious odor of it demoralized his senses and his caution.  For a few seconds he resisted, then thrust himself out toward it an inch at a time, made a sudden grab, and swallowed it at one gulp