CHAPTER VII.
Peter was on his way to the mystery of the bundle he had found in the jackpines.
At the foot of the ridge, where the green plain fought with the blighting edge of the Stew-Kettle, he stood for many minutes before he started east-ward.

With keen eyes gleaming behind his mop of scraggly face-bristles he critically surveyed both land and air, and then, with the slight limp in his gait which would always remain as a mark of Jed Hawkins' brutality, he trotted deliberately in the direction of the whiskey-runner's cabin home.
A bitter memory of Jed Hawkins flattened his ears when he came near the rock-cluttered coulee in which he had fought for Nada, and had suffered his broken bones, and today--even as he obeyed the instinctive caution to stop and listen--Jed Hawkins himself came out of the mouth of the coulee, bearing a brown jug in one hand and a thick cudgel in the other.
His one wicked eye gleamed in the waning sun.

His lean and scraggly face was alight with a sinister exultation as he paused for a moment close to the rock behind which Peter was hidden, and Peter's fangs lay bare and his body trembled while the man stood there.

Then he moved on, and Peter did not stir, but waited until the jug and the cudgel and the man were out of sight.
Low under his breath he was snarling when he went on.

Hatred, for a moment, had flamed hot in his soul.