lack mystery of its deeper shadows. The bit
of forest filled a cup-like depression in the plain, and was possibly
half a rifle-shot distance from end to end--but to Peter it was as vast
as life itself. And something urged him to go in.

And as he lay there, desire and indecision struggling for mastery
within him, no power could have told Peter that destinies greater than
his own were working through the soul of the dog that was in him, and
that on his decision to go in or not to go in--on the triumph of
courage or cowardice--there rested the fates of lives greater than his
own, of men, and women, and of little children still unborn. A glass of
wine once lost a kingdom, a nail turned the tide of a mighty battle,
and a woman's smile once upon a time destroyed the homes of a million
people. Thus have trivial things played their potent parts in the
history of human lives, yet these things Peter did not know--nor that
his greatest hour had come.

At last he rose from his squatting posture, and stood upon his feet. He
was not a beautiful pup, this Peter _Pied-Bot_--or Peter Club-foot, as
Jolly Roger McKay--who lived over in the big cedar swamp--had named him
when he gave Peter to the girl. He was, in a way, an accident and a
homely one at that. His father was a blue-blooded fighting Airedale who
had broken from his kennel long enough to commit a _mesalliance_ with a
huge big footed and peace-loving Mackenzie hound--and Peter was the
result. He wore the fiercely bristling whiskers of his Airedale father
at the age of three months; his ears were flappy and big, his tail was
knotted, and his legs were ungainly and loose, with huge feet at the
end of them--so big and heavy that he stumbled frequently, and fell on
his nose. One pitied him at first--and then loved him. For Peter, in
spite of his homeliness, had the two best bloods of all dog creation in
his veins. Yet in a way it was like mixing nitro-glycerin with olive
oil, or dynamite and saltpeter with milk and honey.

Peter's heart was thumping rapidly as he took a step toward the deeper
shadows. He swallowed hard, as if to clear a knot out of his scrawny
throat. But he had made up his mind. Something was compelling him, and
he would go in. Slowly the gloom engulfed him, and once again the
whimsical spirit of fatalism had chosen a trivial thing to work out its
ends in the romance and tragedy of human lives.

Grim shadows began to surround Peter, and his ears shot up, and a