It was in the first graying light of July dawn that Peter dragged himself up the rough side of a ridge and looked down into a narrow strip of plain on the other side.  Just as Nada had given up in weakness and despair, so now he was almost ready to quit.  He had traveled miles since the owl fight, and his wounds had stiffened, and with every step gave him excruciating pain.  His injured eye was entirely closed, and there was a strange, dull ache in the back of his head, where Gargantua had pounded him with his beak.  The strip of valley, half hidden in its silvery mist of dawn, seemed a long distance away to Peter, and he dropped on his belly and began to lick his raw shoulder with a feverish tongue.  He was sick and tired, and the futility of going farther oppressed him.  He looked again down into the strip of plain, and whined.

Then, suddenly, he smelled something that was not the musty fog-mist that hung between the ridges.  It was smoke.  Peter’s heart beat faster, and he pulled himself to his feet, and went in its direction.

Hidden in a little grassy cup between two great boulders that thrust themselves out from the face of the ridge, he found Jolly Roger.  First he saw the smouldering embers of a fire that was almost out—­and then his master.  Jolly Roger was asleep.  Storm-beaten and strangely haggard and gray his face was turned to the sky.  Peter did not awaken him.  There was something in his master’s face that quieted the low whimper in his throat.  Very gently he crept to him, and lay down.  The movement, slight as it was, made the man stir.  His hand rose, and then fell limply across Peter’s body.  But the fingers moved.

Unconsciously, as if guided by the spirit and prayer of the girl waiting far back in the forest, they twined about the cloth around Peter’s neck—­his message to his master.

And for a long time after that, as the sun rose over a wonderful world, Peter and his master slept.

CHAPTER IX

It was the restlessness of Peter that roused Jolly Roger.  Half awake, and before he opened his eyes, life seized upon him where sleep had cut it off for a time last night.  His muscles ached.  His neck was stiff.  He seemed weighted like a log to the hard earth.  Swiftly the experience of the preceding hours rushed upon him, and it was in the first of this wakefulness that he felt the presence of Peter.

He sat up and stared wide-eyed at the dog.  The fact that Peter had escaped from the cabin, and had followed him, was not altogether amazing.  It was quite the natural thing for a one-man dog to do.  But the unexpectedness of it held McKay speechless, and at first a little disappointed.  It was as if Peter had deliberately betrayed a trust.  During the storm and flight of the night McKay had thought of him as the one connecting link remaining between him and the girl he loved.  He had left Peter to fill his place, to guard and watch and keep alive the memory of the man who was gone.  For him there had been something of consolation in this giving up of his comradeship to Nada.  And Peter had turned traitor.