reward for a blistering climb. On all sides, a paradise of green
and yellow and gold, stretched the vast wilderness, studded with
shimmering lakes that gleamed here and there from out of their
rich dark frames of spruce and cedar and balsam. And half way
between the edge of the plain and this highest pinnacle of rock,
utterly hidden from the eyes of both man and beast, nestled the
hiding place which Jolly Roger and Peter had found.

It was a cool and cavernous spot, in spite of the Sahara-like heat
of the great pile. In the very heart of it two gigantic masses of
rock had put their shoulders together, like Gog and Magog, so that
under their ten thousand tons of weight was a crypt-like tunnel as
high as a man's head, into which the light and the glare of the
sun never came.

Peter, now that he had grown accustomed to the deadness of it,
liked this change from Indian Tom's cabin. He liked his wallow of
soft sand during the day, and he liked still more the aloneness
and the aloofness of their ramparted stronghold when the cool of
evening came. He did not, of course, understand just what their
escape from Cassidy had meant, but instinct was shrewdly at work
within him, and no wolf could have guarded the place more
carefully than he. And he had all creation in mind when he guarded
the rock-pile.

All but Nada. Many times he whimpered for her, just as the great
call for her was in Jolly Roger's own heart. And on this third
afternoon, as the hot July sun dipped half way to the western
forests, both Peter and his master were looking yearningly, and
with the same thought, toward the east, where over the back-bone