dark hours the green spruce fire burned slowly and steadily.
For a long time there was wailing of wind out in the open. But at last
it died away, and utter stillness filled the world. No life moved in
these hours which followed the giving up of the big storm's last
gasping breath. Slowly the sky cleared. Here and there a star burned
through. But Jolly Roger and Peter, deep in the sleep of exhaustion,
knew nothing of the change.

CHAPTER XVI

It was Peter who roused Jolly Roger many hours later; Peter nosing
about the still burning embers of the fire, and at last muzzling his
master's face with increasing anxiety. McKay sat up out of his nest of
balsam boughs and blankets and caught the bright glint of sunlight
through the treetops. He rubbed his eyes and stared again to make sure.
Then he looked at his watch. It was ten o'clock and peering in the
direction of the open he saw the white edge of it glistening in the
unclouded blaze of a sun. It was the first sun--the first real sun--he
had seen for many days, and with Peter he went to the rim of the barren
a hundred yards distant. He wanted to shout. As far as he could see the
white plain was ablaze with eye-blinding light, and never had the sky
at Cragg's Ridge been clearer than the sky that was over him now.

He returned to the fire, singing. Back through the months leapt Peter's
memory to the time when his master had sung like that. It was in Indian
Tom's cabin, with Cragg's Ridge just beyond the creek, and it was in
those days before Terence Cassidy had come to drive them to another
hiding place; in the happy days of Nada's visits and of their trysts
under the Ridge, when even the little gray mother mouse lived in a
paradise with her nest of babies in the box on their cabin shelf. He
had almost forgotten but it came back to him now. It was the old Jolly
Roger--the old master come to life again.

In the clear stillness of the morning one might have heard that
shouting song half a mile away. But McKay was no longer afraid. As the
storm seemed to have cleaned the world so the sun cleared his soul of
its last shadow of doubt. It was not merely an omen or a promise, but
for him proclaimed a certainty. God was with him. Life was with him.
His world was opening its arms to him again--and he sang as if Nada was
only a mile away from him instead of a thousand.

When he went on, after their breakfast, he laughed at the thought of
Breault discovering their trail. The