ED
him to go!

The night swallowed him. He became a part of the yellow floods of its
moonlight, a part of its shifting shadows, a part of its stillness, its
mystery, its promise of impending things. He knew that grim and
terrible happenings had come with the storm, and he still sensed the
nearness of tragedy in this night-world through which he was passing.
He did not go swiftly, yet he went three times as fast as the girl and
he had traveled together. He was cautious and watchful, and at
intervals he stopped and listened, and swallowed hard to keep the whine
of eagerness out of his throat. Now that he was alone every instinct in
him was keyed to the pulse and beat of life about him. He knew the
Night People of the deep forests were awake. Softly padded, clawed,
sharp-beaked and feathered--the prowlers of darkness were on the move.
With the stillness of shadows they were stealing through the moonlit
corridors of the wilderness, or hovering gray-winged and ghostly in the
ambuscades of the treetops, eager to waylay and kill, hungering for the
flesh and blood of creatures weaker than themselves. Peter knew. Both
heritage and experience warned him. And he watched the shadows, and
sniffed the air, and kept his fangs half bared and ready as he followed
the trail of McKay.

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 pass