It was the first sun--the first real sun--he had seen for many days, and with Peter he went to the rim of the barren a hundred yards distant.

He wanted to shout.

As far as he could see the white plain was ablaze with eye-blinding light, and never had the sky at Cragg's Ridge been clearer than the sky that was over him now.
He returned to the fire, singing.

Back through the months leapt Peter's memory to the time when his master had sung like that.

It was in Indian Tom's cabin, with Cragg's Ridge just beyond the creek, and it was in those days before Terence Cassidy had come to drive them to another hiding place; in the happy days of Nada's visits and of their trysts under the Ridge, when even the little gray mother mouse lived in a paradise with her nest of babies in the box on their cabin shelf.