The “perfectly sweet dog” would growl and show his fangs, as much as to say, “Leave me out of it. Look after your legs. I wish I had half a chance of showing you how perfectly sweet I am.” Where did they all come from, these amorous butterfly excursionists? Harry kept his mouth shut. He wasn't going to tell, only---- Well, he hinted that they might be insincere experiments of the golden woman, sent to supplant her--sent because she knew they couldn't do it. “And jolly good care she takes not to send the right one. Trust her.” Harry said it in a growl which he copied from Canute. It wasn't until they had entered the Haunted Wood and the green wall of bushes and make-believe had shut out intruders, that his ruffled spirit regained its levity. Then he'd light a fire, and play at Indians who had taken their revenge in scalps. Presently, if the Faun Man had been lucky in getting rid of his worries, he would join them. They would boil a kettle and have tea in the open, after which the Faun Man would light his pipe and smoke it, lying flat on his back. They knew what to expect. Soon he would sit up, press his tobacco down with a lean finger, pluck a twig out of the fire and use it as a match. Then, very deliberately, he would begin, “I remember, once upon a time.” What a lot of magnificent things had happened once upon a time that he could remember! He had chased cattle thieves across the border and had come up with them, intending to shoot if necessary, only to find them such human fellows that he'd parted friends. “Human” was his word for describing the kind of people he liked, many of whom were disreputable. One night, when camping in the Canadian Rockies, a hundred miles from anywhere, a stranger had crept from the forest and shared his supper and blanket. They had talked of London, London street-songs and Leicester Square, till the stars were going out. Next morning he was wakened by a member of the North West Mounted Police who was hunting a murderer. The fugitive had already vanished. “A pity he'd killed some one,” said the Faun Man; “he was one of the most charmin' chaps I ever met. Oh yes, he was caught and hanged.” The Faun Man had played hide-and-seek with death in many quaint corners of the world--getting his “liver into whack,” he called it, and gathering “local color.” What local color might be, and why anyone should want to gather it, Peter didn't understand. But he learnt that its gathering took you down into Mexico in search of secret gold, where Indians hid behind rocks and potted at you with poisoned arrows, and that it took you up to Fort Mackenzie with dogs to the very edge of the Arctic. While he listened to these stories of adventure, the shadows of the Haunted Wood lengthened, the river sang more boldly, evening fell, and the fire, from a pyramid of leaping flames, became a hollow land of scarlet which grew slowly gray, fluttering with little tufts of ashen moss and ashen feathers, until it at last lay charred and dead.