faced about.  Nothing was following him, and the importance of his achievements grew upon him.  He began to swell; his fore-legs he planted pugnaciously, he hollowed his back, and began to bark with all the puppyish ferocity that was in him.  And though he continued to yelp, and pounded the earth with his paws, and tore up the green grass with his sharp little teeth, nothing dared to come out of the black forest in answer to his challenge!

His head was high and his ears cocked jauntily as he trotted up the slope, and for the first time in his three months of existence he yearned to give battle to something that was alive.  He was a changed Peter, no longer satisfied with the thought of gnawing sticks or stones or mauling a rabbit skin.  At the crest of the slope he stopped, and yelped down, almost determined to go back to that black patch of forest and chase out everything that was in it.  Then he turned toward Cragg’s Ridge, and what he saw seemed slowly to shrink up the pugnaciousness that was in him, and his stiffened tail drooped until the knotty end of it touched the ground.

Three or four hundred yards away, out of the heart of that cup-like paradise which ran back through a break in the ridge, rose a spiral of white smoke, and with the sight of that smoke Peter heard also the chopping of axe.  It made him shiver, and yet he made his way toward it.  He was not old enough—­nor was it in the gentle blood of his Mackenzie mother—­to know the meaning of hate; but something was growing swiftly in Peter’s shrewd little head, and he sensed impending danger whenever he heard the sound of the axe.  For always there was associated with that sound the cat-like, thin-faced man with the red bristle on his upper lip, and the one eye that never opened but was always closed.  And Peter had come to fear this one eyed man more than he feared any of the ghostly monsters hidden in the black pit of the forest he had braved that day.

But the owls, and the porcupine, and the fiery-eyed fox that had run away from him, had put into Peter something which was not in him yesterday, and he did not slink on his belly when he came to the edge of the cup between the broken ridge, but stood up boldly on his crooked legs and looked ahead of him.  At the far edge of the cup, under the western shoulder of the ridge, was a thick scattering of tall cedars and green poplars and white birch, and in the shelter of these was a cabin built of logs.  A lovelier spot could not have been chosen for the home of man.  The hollow, from where Peter stood, was a velvety carpet of green, thickly strewn with flowers and ferns, sweet with the scent of violets and wild honey-suckle, and filled with the song of birds.  Through the middle of it purled a tiny creek which disappeared between the ragged shoulders of rock, and close to this creek stood the cabin, its log walls smothered under a luxuriant growth of wood-vine.  But Peter’s quizzical little eyes were not measuring the beauty of the place, nor were his ears listening to the singing of birds, or the chattering of a red-squirrel on a stub a few yards away.  He was looking beyond the cabin, to a chalk-white mass of rock that rose like a giant mushroom in the edge of the trees—­and he was listening to the ringing of the axe, and straining his ears to catch the sound of a voice.