"Poor little devils, both of them," he said, and went in to his bed.
Peter heard the door close. It seemed easier for him now to lie down upon the blankets. The moonlight streamed in upon him, and Peter could feel it. There was always that something warm and comforting about the moon. He closed his eyes, and his thoughts no longer brought a lump into his throat or hurt him. It was as if an older mind were helping him over certain difficult places. It assured him his father was safe. The police would not get him, and it would not be long before he returned. If he failed to do that he would surely write, and Peter could then go to him.
He began to think of Mona. She was, after all, the pleasantest thing he had ever had to think about, in spite of his happiness with his father. He reviewed the fight of that day and grew warm with anticipations of tomorrow and a renewal of hostilities. His hands clenched when he pictured Aleck Curry with his ugly face and big, heavy body, but they relaxed when he visioned Mona as she had taken part in the fight, with her shining black hair streaming about her and flaming eyes so beautiful he had at first been afraid to look at them. In his life in the wilderness he had never had much to do with girls, but here was one who pleased him completely, and all the ideals which his father had built up in him were roused and set on fire. His mother must have been like Mona when she was a little girl, because it seemed to him his father had always pictured her like that.
Then he grew uneasy and shame crept a little upon him. It made him squirm in his blankets to think that Aleck Curry would have whipped him if Mona hadn't joined in those last two or three minutes of the fight. That Aleck was bigger and older than he, and that he had fought under the disadvantages of hunger and exhaustion, did not satisfactorily explain his own failure to Peter. He was glad his father had not seen that fight, even though he had been taken at a great disadvantage. But Mona had seen it. She had seen him on the ground in those final moments, with Aleck about to pommel him into disgraceful submission, and she had come in to save him.
There was only one thing to do under the circumstances, and the inspiration of it comforted him. He would go out early in the morning, hunt up Aleck Curry and lick him. He was sure he could do it now, even though he was smaller and lighter than Aleck, for he would be rested and would have a good breakfast to start with.
He fell asleep. The big owl hooted softly from the top of a stub near the mill, and the flying squirrel was joined by its mate in a game of tag on the roof. The moon sailed higher, and under it a buck and a doe crossed within a stone's throw of Peter's window. All this Peter missed in an excitement of his own as his unsettled mind traveled swiftly from one dream to another. First he was fleeing with his father, and they were pursued by a horde of enemies, and all of these enemies were Aleck Currys. After that he dreamed of Aleck and Mona, and he fought so fiercely, with Mona's dark eyes and hair filling his vision, that Simon heard him twisting and groaning and climbed quietly up the ladder from below to look at him.
For a long time the stern Scotchman watched Peter, and in the fainter light of the moon which now filled the room a miracle of change passed over his face and it became as gentle as a woman's. No one, since long years ago, had ever caught that gentleness in Simon McQuarrie's face.
"It seems only yesterday," he whispered softly to himself, in a moment when Peter's pale face lay quietly in the crook of his arm. "Only yesterday, Helen."
Something trembled inside him, and he knew the mother was in that room with Peter, watching over him as he had seen her many times in those years when he had cared for the two, those beautiful but pitiless years when he had hardened his heart against all hope for himself in his devotion and duty to his hunted friend, Donald McRae. Only yesterday! And yet many hard and tedious years had passed since then, and through them he had gone like a piece of iron that is hardened into steel by the alchemy of fire. Tonight had come the mysterious change. He climbed down softly, his heart trembling. He loved Peter. He loved him as he had loved the mother.