Almost in the same movement his gun-arm dropped limply to his side.

“Well, I’ll be—­”

He stared.  And the face in the doorway stared back at him.

“Nada!” he gasped.  “Good Lord, I thought—­I thought—­” He swallowed as he tried to lie.  “I thought—­it might be a bear!”

He did not, at first, see that the slim, calico-dressed little figure of Jed Hawkins’ foster-girl was almost dripping wet.  Her blue eyes were shining at him, wide and startled.  Her cheeks were flushed.  A strange look had frozen on her parted red lips, and her hair was falling loose in a cloud of curling brown tresses about her shoulders.  Jolly Roger, dreaming of her in his insane happiness of a few minutes ago, sensed nothing beyond the beauty and the unexpectedness of her in this first moment.  Then—­swiftly —­he saw the other thing.  The last glow of the sun glistened in her wet hair, her dress was sodden and clinging, and little pools of water were widening slowly about her ragged shoes.  These things he might have expected, for she had to cross the creek.  But it was the look in her eyes that startled him, as she stood there with Peter, the mongrel pup, clasped tightly in her arms.

“Nada, what’s happened?” he asked, laying his gun on the table.  “You fell in the creek—­”

“It—­it’s Peter,” she cried, with a sobbing break in her voice.  “We come on Jed Hawkins when he was diggin’ up some of his whiskey, and he was mad, and pulled my hair, and Peter bit him—­ and then he picked up Peter and threw him against a rock—­and he’s terribly hurt!  Oh, Mister Jolly Roger—­”

She held out the pup to him, and Peter whimpered as Jolly Roger took his wiry little face between his hands, and then lifted him gently.  The girl was sobbing, with passionate little catches in her breath, but there were no tears in her eyes as they turned for an instant from Peter to the gun on the table.

“If I’d had that,” she cried, “I’d hev killed him!”

Jolly Roger’s face was coldly gray as he knelt down on the floor and bent over Peter.

“He—­pulled your hair, you say?”

“I—­forgot,” she whispered, close at his shoulder.  “I wasn’t goin’ to tell you that.  But it didn’t hurt.  It was Peter—­”

He felt the damp caress of her curls upon his neck as she bent over him.

“Please tell me, Mister Jolly Roger—­is he hurt—­bad?”

With the tenderness of a woman Jolly Roger worked his fingers over Peter’s scrawny little body.  And Peter, whimpering softly, felt the infinite consolation of their touch.  He was no longer afraid of Jed Hawkins, or of pain, or of death.  The soul of a dog is simple in its measurement of blessings, and to Peter it was a great happiness to lie here, broken and in pain, with the face of his beloved mistress over him and Jolly Roger’s hands working to mend his hurt.  He whimpered when Jolly Roger found the broken place, and he cried out like a little child