And now, in these days, it seemed to Jolly Roger that a great kindness, and not tragedy, had delayed him so that his “home coming” was in the gladness of spring.  All about him was the sweetness and mystic whispering of new life just awakening.  It was in the sky and the sun; it was underfoot, in the fragrance of the mold he trod upon, in the trees about him, and in the mate-chirping of the birds flocking back from the southland.  His friends the jays were raucous and jaunty again, bullying and bluffing in the warmth of sunshine; the black glint of crows’ wings flashed across the opens; the wood-sappers and pewees and big-eyed moose-birds were aflutter with the excitement of home planning; partridges were feasting on the swelling poplar buds—­ and then, one glorious sunset, he heard the chirruping evening song of his first robin.

And the next day they would reach Cragg’s Ridge!

Half of that last night he sat up, awake, or smoked in the glow of his fire, waiting for the dawn.  With the first lifting of darkness he was traveling swiftly ahead of Peter and the morning was only half gone when he saw far ahead of him the great ridge which shut out Indian Tom’s swamp, and Nada’s plain, and Cragg’s Ridge beyond it.

It was noon when he stood at the crest of this.  He was breathing hard, for to reach this last precious height from which he might look upon the country of Nada’s home he had half run up its rock-strewn side.  There, with his lungs gasping for air, his eager eyes shot over the country below him and for a moment the significance of the thing which he saw did not strike him.  And then in another instant it seemed that his heart choked up, like a fist suddenly tightened, and stopped its beating.

Reaching away from him, miles upon miles of it, east, west and south—­was a dead and char-stricken world.

Up to the foot of the ridge itself had come the devastation of flame, and where it had swept, months ago, there was now no sign of the glorious spring that lay behind him.

He looked for Indian Tom’s swamp, and where it had been there was no longer a swamp but a stricken chaos of ten thousand black stubs, the shriven corpses of the spruce and cedar and jackpines out of which the wolves had howled at night.

He looked for the timber on Sucker Creek where the little old Missioner’s cabin lay, and where he had dreamed that Nada would be waiting for him.  And he saw no timber there but only the littleness and emptiness of a blackened world.

And then he looked to Cragg’s Ridge, and along the bald crest of it, naked as death, he saw blackened stubs pointing skyward, painting desolation against the blue of the heaven beyond.

A cry came from him, a cry of fear and of horror, for he was looking upon the fulfilment of Yellow Bird’s prediction.  He seemed to hear, whispering softly in his ears, the low, sweet voice of the sorceress, as on the night when she had told him that if he returned to Cragg’s Ridge he would find a world that had turned black with ruin and that it would not be there he would ever find Nada.