quietly in the dark, and he heard the low, trembling whisper of
Nada's voice at the window. There was something in the note of it,
and in the caution of Jolly Roger's reply, that held him stiff and
attentive, his ears wide-open for approaching sound. For several
minutes he stood thus, and then the whispering voices at the
window ceased and he heard his master retreating very quietly
through the night. When Jolly Roger spoke to him, back under the
broken shoulder of the ridge, he did not know that Peter had stood
near the window.

McKay stood looking back at the pale glow of light in the cabin.

"Something happened there tonight--something she wouldn't tell me
about," he said, speaking half to Peter and half to himself. "I
could FEEL it. I wish I could have seen her face."

He set out over the plain; and then, as if remembering that he
must explain the matter to Peter, he said:

"She can't get out tonight, Pied-Bot, but she'll come to us in the
jackpines tomorrow afternoon. We'll have to wait"

He tried to say the thing cheerfully, but between this night and
tomorrow afternoon seemed an interminable time, now that he was
determined to make a clean breast of his affairs to Nada, and
leave the country. Most of that night he walked in the coolness of
the moonlit plain, and for a long time he sat amid the flower-
scented shadows of the trysting-place in the heart of the jackpine
clump, where Nada had a hidden place all her own. It was here that
Peter discovered something which Jolly Roger could not see in the