em floated over his head.

He was badly hurt. There were ragged tears in his flank and back, and a
last stroke of Gargantua's talons had stabbed his shoulder to the bone.
Blood dripped from him, and one of his eyes was closing, so that shapes
and shadows were grotesquely dim in the night. Instinct and caution,
and the burning pains in his body, urged him to lie down in a thicket
and wait for the day. But stronger than these were memory of the girl's
urging voice, the vague thrill of the cloth still about his neck, and
the freshness of Jolly Roger's trail as it kept straight on through the
forest's moonlit corridors and caverns of gloom.

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