He got up, and Peter could hear him undressing.  Then he made a nest for Peter on the floor, and stretched himself out in the bunk; and after that, for a long time, there seemed to be something heavier than the gloom of night in the cabin for Peter, and he listened and waited and prayed in his dog way for Nada’s return, and wondered why it was that she left him so long.  And the Night People held high carnival under the yellow moon, and there was flight and terror and slaughter in the glow of it—­and Jolly Roger slept, and the wolf howled nearer, and the creek chortled its incessant song of running water, and in the end Peter’s eyes closed, and a red-eyed ermine peeped over the sill into the man-and dog-scented stillness of the outlaw’s cabin.

For many days after this first night in the cabin, Peter did not see Nada.  There was more rain, and the creek flooded higher, so that each time Jolly Roger went over to Cragg’s Ridge he took his life in his hands in fording the stream.  Peter saw no one but Jolly Roger, and at the end of the second week he was going about on his mended leg.  But there would always be a limp in his gait, and always his right hind-foot would leave a peculiar mark in the trail.

These two weeks of helplessness were an education in Peter’s life and were destined to leave their mark upon him always.  He learned to know Jolly Roger, not alone from seeing events, but through an intuitive instinct that grew swiftly somewhere in his shrewd head.  This instinct, given widest scope in these weeks of helplessness, developed faster than any other in him, until in the end, he could judge Jolly Roger’s humor by the sound of his approaching footsteps.  Never was there a waking hour in which he was not fighting to comprehend the mystery of the change that had come over his life.  He knew that Nada was gone, and each day that passed put her farther away from him, yet he also sensed the fact that Jolly Roger went to her, and when the outlaw returned to the cabin Peter was filled with a yearning hope that Nada was returning with him.

But gradually Peter came to think less about Nada, and more about Jolly Roger, until at last his heart beat with a love for this man which was greater than all other things in his world.  And in these days Jolly Roger found in Peter’s comradeship and growing understanding a comforting outlet for the things which at times consumed him.  Peter saw it all—­hours when Jolly Roger’s voice and laughter filled the cabin with cheer and happiness, and others when his face was set in grim lines, with that hard, far-away look in his eyes that Peter could never quite make out.  It was at such times, when Jolly Roger held a choking grip on the love in his heart, that he told Peter things which he had never revealed to a human soul.

In the dusk of one evening, as he sat wet with the fording of the creek, he said to Peter,