She followed Peter.

For a long time the storm had been gathering in her brain, a storm which she had held back, smothered under her unhappiness, so that only Peter had seen the lightning-flashes of it.

But today the betrayal had forced itself from her lips, and in a hard little voice she had told Jolly Roger--the stranger who had come into the black forest--how her mother and father had died of the same plague more than ten years ago, and how Jed Hawkins and his woman had promised to keep her for three silver fox skins which her father had caught before the sickness came.

That much the woman had confided in her, for she was only six when it happened.

And she had not dared to look at Jolly Roger when she told him of what had passed since then, so she saw little of the hardening in his face as he listened.