"Don't kill the white one!" he cried. "Don't kill it!"
Simon McQuarrie, about to make for his second victim, looked up at the window in surprise. Peter saw the gray porcupine ambling back toward the timber, grunting and protesting as he went, and Simon made no effort to overtake him.
"They were having a fine fight," explained Peter. "That black one was Aleck Curry, and the other was licking him. He was smaller, too."
For a space the Scotchman stood silent in the moonlight. Then he asked, "Have you been asleep, Peter?"
Peter shook his head. "No."
"What have you been doing?"
"Just looking at the moon."
Simon turned slowly, with a suspicious upward glance at Peter.
"Better go now," he advised. "If you don't I'll ask you to come down and sleep with me." As he disappeared round the end of the cabin, his scant nightgown flapping above his long and bony legs, Simon muttered under his breath: "Donald was wrong in having me tell the lad. Better to have lied and never let him know. As it is——"
An expression which only Donald McRae would have understood settled in his face, and he paused for a moment at his door to look across the open where Pierre Gourdon's home lay in the radiance of the night. He could see the window of the room in which Mona slept, and the lines about his stern mouth softened.