And all the time she was talking to him in a half sobbing, excited little voice, and the blood in Peter’s body ran swifter, and the strange thrill in him was greater.  When she had finished she rose to her feet, and stood there swaying back and forth, like one of the spruce-top shadows, while she pointed up the moonlit trail.

“Go, Peter!” she cried softly.  “Quick!  Follow him, Peter—­catch him—­bring him back!  Mister Roger—­Jolly Roger—­go, Peter!  Go—­go —­go—­”

It was strange to Peter.  But he was beginning to understand.  He sniffed in Jolly Roger’s footprints, and then he looked up quickly, and saw that it had pleased the girl.  She was urging him on.  He sniffed from one footprint to another, and Nada clapped her hands and cried out that he was right—­for him to hurry—­hurry—­

Impulse, thought, swiftly growing knowledge of something to be done thrilled in his brain.  Nada wanted him to go.  She wanted him to go to Jolly Roger.  And she had put something around his neck which she wanted him to take with him.  He whined eagerly, a bit excitedly.  Then he began to trot.  Instinctively it was his test.  She did not call him back.  He flattened his ears, listening for her command to return, but it did not come.  And then the thrill in him leapt over all other things.  He was right.  He was not abandoning Nada.  He was not running away.  She wanted him to go!

The night swallowed him.  He became a part of the yellow floods of its moonlight, a part of its shifting shadows, a part of its stillness, its mystery, its promise of impending things.  He knew that grim and terrible happenings had come with the storm, and he still sensed the nearness of tragedy in this night-world through which he was passing.  He did not go swiftly, yet he went three times as fast as the girl and he had traveled together.  He was cautious and watchful, and at intervals he stopped and listened, and swallowed hard to keep the whine of eagerness out of his throat.  Now that he was alone every instinct in him was keyed to the pulse and beat of life about him.  He knew the Night People of the deep forests were awake.  Softly padded, clawed, sharp-beaked and feathered—­the prowlers of darkness were on the move.  With the stillness of shadows they were stealing through the moonlit corridors of the wilderness, or hovering gray-winged and ghostly in the ambuscades of the treetops, eager to waylay and kill, hungering for the flesh and blood of creatures weaker than themselves.  Peter knew.  Both heritage and experience warned him.  And he watched the shadows, and sniffed the air, and kept his fangs half bared and ready as he followed the trail of McKay.