He was not stirred by the impulse of adventure alone.  Without the finesse of what man might charitably call reason in a beast, he had sensed a responsibility.  It was present in the closely drawn strips of faded cloth about his neck.  It was, in a way, a part of the girl herself, a part of her flesh and blood, a part of her spirit—­something vital to her and dependent upon him.  He was ready to guard it with every instinct of caution and every ounce of courage there was in him.  And to protect it meant to fight.  That was the first law of his breed, the primal warning which came to him through the red blood of many generations of wilderness forefathers.  So he listened, and he watched, and his blood pounded hot in his veins as he followed the footprints in the trail.  A bit of brush, swinging suddenly free from where it had been prisoned by the storm, drew a snarl from him as he faced the sound with the quickness of a cat.  A gray streak, passing swiftly over the trail ahead of him, stirred a low growl in his throat.  It was a lynx, and for a space Peter paused, and then sped soft-footed past the moon-lit spot where the stiletto-clawed menace of the woods had passed.

Now that he was alone, and no longer accompanied by a human presence whose footsteps and scent held the wild things aloof and still, Peter felt nearer and nearer to him the beat and stir of life.  Powerful beaks, instead of remaining closed and without sound, snapped and hissed at him as the big gray owls watched his passing.  He heard the rustling of brush, soft as the stir of a woman’s dress, where living things were secretly moving, and he heard the louder crash of clumsy and piggish feet, and caught the strong scent of a porcupine as it waddled to its midnight lunch of poplar bark.  Then the trail ended, and Jolly Roger’s scent led into the pathless forest, with its shifting streams and pools of moonlight, its shadows and black pits of darkness.  And here—­now—­ Peter began his trespass into the strongholds of the People of the Night.  He heard a wolf howl, a cry filled with loneliness, yet with a shivering death-note in it; he caught the musky, skunkish odor of a fox that was stalking prey in the face of a whispering breath of wind; once, in a moment of dead stillness, he listened to the snap of teeth and the crackle of bones in one of the dark pits, where a fisher-cat—­with eyes that gleamed like coals of fire—­was devouring the warm and bleeding carcass of a mother partridge.  And beaks snapped at him more menacingly as he went on, and gray shapes floated over his head, and now and then he heard the cries of dying things—­the agonized squeak of a wood-mouse, the cry of a day-bird torn from its sleeping place by a sinuous, beady-eyed creature of fur and claw, the noisy screaming of a rabbit swooped upon and pierced to the vitals by one of the gray-feathered pirates of the air.  And then, squarely in the center of a great pool of moonlight, Peter came upon a monster.  It was a bear, a huge