Just under Cragg’s Ridge lay the paradise, a meadow-like sweep of plain that reached down to the edge of Clearwater Lake, with clumps of poplars and white birch and darker tapestries of spruce and balsams dotting it like islets in a sea of verdant green.  The flowers were two weeks ahead of their time and the sweet perfumes of late June, instead of May, rose up out of the plain, and already there was nesting in the velvety splashes of timber.

In the edge of a clump of this timber, flat on his belly, lay Peter.  The love of adventure was in him, and today he had sallied forth on his most desperate enterprise.  For the first time he had gone alone to the edge of Clearwater Lake, half a mile away; boldly he had trotted up and down the white strip of beach where the girl’s footprints still remained in the sand, and defiantly he had yipped at the shimmering vastness of the water, and at the white gulls circling near him in quest of dead fish flung ashore.  Peter was three months old.  Yesterday he had been a timid pup, shrinking from the bigness and strangeness of everything about him; but today he had braved the lake trail on his own nerve, and nothing had dared to come near him in spite of his yipping, so that a great courage and a great desire were born in him.

Therefore, in returning, he had paused in the edge of a great clump of balsams and spruce, and lay flat on his belly, his sharp little eyes leveled yearningly at the black mystery of its deeper shadows.  The bit of forest filled a cup-like depression in the plain, and was possibly half a rifle-shot distance from end to end—­but to Peter it was as vast as life itself.  And something urged him to go in.

And as he lay there, desire and indecision struggling for mastery within him, no power could have told Peter that destinies greater than his own were working through the soul of the dog that was in him, and that on his decision to go in or not to go in—­on the triumph of courage or cowardice—­there rested the fates of lives greater than his own, of men, and women, and of little children still unborn.  A glass of wine once lost a kingdom, a nail turned the tide of a mighty battle, and a woman’s smile once upon a time destroyed the homes of a million people.  Thus have trivial things played their potent parts in the history of human lives, yet these things Peter did not know—­nor that his greatest hour had come.

At last he rose from his squatting posture, and stood upon his feet.  He was not a beautiful pup, this Peter Pied-Bot—­or Peter Club-foot, as Jolly Roger McKay—­who lived over in the big cedar swamp—­had named him when he gave Peter to the girl.  He was, in a way, an accident and a homely one at that.  His father was a blue-blooded fighting Airedale who had broken from his kennel long enough to commit a MESALLIANCE with a huge big footed and peace-loving Mackenzie hound—­and Peter was the result.  He wore the fiercely bristling whiskers of his Airedale father at the age of three