nvest
their joint capital for their proposed journey to the western wilderness,
where, they planned, they would make homes and secure farms for
themselves amid savages and wild beasts! They must be obtaining this and
other information at once. They would have learned much that very evening
had not the man to whom they were going in quest of advice, been
assaulted by Big Pete Ellis. And what of that burly giant, by the way?

"But this will never do. I must be getting to sleep," Ree said to
himself.

Going to sleep just when one wishes, however, is not always easy. Ree
found it the very opposite. Tired as he was, his mind went over the
adventure of the night, and in a round-about way to his future home in
the wilderness, again, before his eyes closed. At last dreams came to
him, and in one of them he saw Big Pete waving a white handkerchief as a
flag of truce. He could not make out for whom the sign of peace was
meant; for a war party of Indians seemed to be hot on the giant's trail,
and it was in the opposite direction that Pete waved the handkerchief.

Ree recalled the dream when pulling on his boots in the morning, and
pondered over the possibility of its having some significance.

Many times during that day the young man had occasion to remember the
incidents of the night preceding. Everyone he met, it seemed, had heard
of his adventure with Big Pete and they all congratulated him. More than
one, too, warned him against the giant Ellis, saying the fellow would
surely seek revenge.

Ree gave but little heed to this talk. Big Pete had had the chance to
kill him, or at least to attempt it, and had not done so, evidently
wishing to avoid blood-shed. But Peter Piper came along during the
afternoon with a story which he had heard in the adjacent village, that
gave the boy some uneasiness. Big Pete had sent word by a farmer he had
seen at daybreak, that he would return to his old haunts and that not a
man would dare to touch him; that he would not be driven off, though he
had killed both Jim Huson and Marvel Rice, and that those who had
interfered with him would suffer for it.

"He's a braggart," said Ree contemptuously.

"Jes' what he says, he will do. He's bad, bad, bad," said Peter Piper in
his simple, earnest way.

So Ree came to look upon the matter with much seriousness. Somehow it
occurred to him that the giant might seek revenge by burning the barn or
poisoning the horses, or some such cowardly thing--he kne