“The only difference,” he explained to Peter, “is that Margaret sacrificed and fought and died for a king, and our Nada is willing to do all that for a poor beggar of an outlaw.  Which makes Margaret a second-rater compared with Nada,” he added.  “For Margaret wanted a kingdom along with her husband, and Nada would take—­just you and me.  And that’s where we’re pulling some Peter the Great stuff,” he tried to laugh.  “We won’t let her do it!”

And so they went on, day after day, toward the Wollaston waterways—­the country of Yellow Bird and her people.

It was early September when they crossed the Geikie and struck up the western shore of Wollaston Lake.  The first golden tints were ripening in the canoe-birch leaves, and the tremulous whisper of autumn was in the rustle of the aspen trees.  The poplars were yellowing, the ash were blood red with fruit, and in cool, dank thickets wild currants were glossy black and lusciously ripe.  It was the season which Jolly Roger loved most of all, and it was the beginning of Peter’s first September.  The days were still hot, but at night there was a bracing something in the air that stirred the blood, and Peter found a sharp, new note in the voices of the wild.  The wolf howled again in the middle of the night.  The loon forgot his love-sickness, and screamed raucous defiance at the moon.  The big snowshoes were no longer tame, but wary and alert, and the owls seemed to slink deeper into darkness and watch with more cunning.  And Jolly Roger knew the human masters of the wilderness were returning from the Posts to their cabins and trap-lines, and he advanced with still greater caution.  And as he went, watching for smoke and listening for sound, he began to reflect upon the many changes which five years might have produced among Yellow Bird’s people.  Possibly other misfortunes had come, other winters of hunger and pestilence, scattering and destroying the tribe.  It might even be that Yellow Bird was dead.

For three days he followed slowly the ragged shore of Wollaston Lake, and foreboding of evil was oppressing him when he came upon the fish-racks of the Indians.  They had been abandoned for many days, for black bear tracks fairly inundated the place, and Peter saw two of the bears—­fat and unafraid—­nosing along the shore where the fish offal had been thrown.

It was the next day, in the hour before sunset, that Jolly Roger and Peter came out on the edge of a shelving beach where Indian children were playing in the white sand.  Among these children, playing and laughing with them, was a woman.  She was tall and slim, with a skirt of soft buckskin that came only a little below her knees, and two shining black braids which tossed like velvety ropes when she ran.  And she was running when they first saw her—­ running away from them, pursued by the children; and then she twisted suddenly, and came toward them, until with a startled cry she stopped almost within the reach of Jolly Roger’s hands.  Peter was watching.  He saw the half frightened look in her face, then the slow widening of her dark eyes, and the quick intake of her breath.  And in that moment Jolly Roger cried out a name.