The Country Beyond by James Oliver Curwood (page 4)

Suddenly he held out a hand to Peter, who sat near the lamp, his bright eyes fixed watchfully on the stranger.

“Nice dog you have, Cummings. Come here, Peter! Peter–Peter–“

Tight ringers seemed to grip at McKay’s throat. He had not spoken Peter’s name since the rescue of Breault.

“Peter–Peter–“

The Ferret was smiling affably. But Peter did not move. He made no response to the outstretched hand. His eyes were steady and challenging. In that moment McKay wanted to hug him up in his arms.

The Ferret laughed.

“He’s a good dog, a very good dog, Cummings. I like a one-man dog, and I also like a one-dog man. That’s what Jolly Roger McKay is, if you ever happen to meet him. Travels with one dog. An Airedale, with whiskers on him like a Mormon. And his name is Peter. Funny name for a dog, isn’t it?”

He faced the outer room, stretching his long arms above his head.

“I’m going to try sleep again, Cummings. Goodnight! And–Mother of Heaven!–listen to the wind.”

“Yes, it’s a bad night,” said McKay.

He looked at Peter when Breault was gone, and his heart was beating fast. He could hear the wind, too. It was sweeping over the Barren more fiercely than before, and the sound of it brought a steely glitter into his eyes. This time he could not run away from the law. Flight meant death. And Breault knew it. He was in a trap–a trap built by himself. That is, if Breault had guessed the truth, and he believed he had. There was only one way out–and that meant fight.

He went into the outer room for his pack and a blanket. He did not look at Breault, but he knew the man’s narrow eyes were following him. He left the alcohol lamp burning, but in his own room, after he had spread out his bed, he extinguished the light. Then, very quietly, he dug a hole through the snow partition between the two rooms. He waited for ten minutes before he thrust a finger-tip through the last thin crust of snow. With his eye close to the aperture he could see Breault. The Ferret was sitting up, and leaning toward Porter, who was sleeping an arm’s length away. He reached over, and touched him on the shoulder.

Jolly Roger widened the snow-slit another inch, straining his ears to hear. He could see Tavish and the girl asleep. In another moment Porter was sitting up, with the Ferret’s hand gripping his arm warningly. Breault motioned toward the inner room, and Porter was silent. Then Breault bent over and began to whisper. Jolly Roger could hear only the indistinct monotone of his voice. But he could see very clearly the change that came into Porter’s face. His eyes widened, and he stared toward the inner room, making a movement as if to rouse Tavish and the girl.

The Ferret stopped him.

“Don’t get excited. Let them sleep.”

McKay heard that much–and no more. For some time after that the two men sat close together, conversing in whispers. There was an exultant satisfaction in Porter’s clean-cut face, as well as in Breault’s. Jolly Roger watched them until Breault extinguished the second lamp. Then he lightly plugged the hole in the partition with snow, and reached out in the darkness until his hand found Peter.

“They think they’ve got us, boy,” he whispered, “They think they’ve got us!”

Very quietly they lay for an hour. McKay did not sleep, and Peter was wide awake. At the end of that hour Jolly Roger crept on his hands and knees to the doorway and listened. One after another he picked out the steady breathing of the sleepers. Then he began feeling his way around the wall of his room until he came to a place where the snow was very soft.

“An air-drift,” he whispered to Peter, close at his shoulder. “We’ll fool ’em, boy. And we’ll fight–if we have to.”

He began worming his head and shoulders and body into the air- drift like a gimlet. A foot at a time he burrowed himself through, heaving his body up and down and sideways to pack the light snow, leaving a round tunnel two feet in diameter behind him. Within an hour he had come to the outer crust on the windward side of the big snow-dune. He did not break through this crust, which was as tough as crystal-glass, but lay quietly for a time and listened to the sweep of the wind outside. It was warm, and very comfortable, and he had half-dozed off before he caught himself back into wakefulness and returned to his room. The mouth of his tunnel he packed with snow. After that he wound the blanket about him and gave himself up calmly to sleep.

Only Peter lay awake after that. And it was Peter who roused Jolly Roger in what would have been the early dawn outside the snow- dune. McKay felt his restless movement, and opened his eyes. A faint light was illumining his room, and he sat up. In the outer room the alcohol lamp was burning again. He could hear movement, and voices that were very low and indistinct. Carefully he dug out once more the little hole in the snow wall, and widened the slit.

Breault and Tavish were asleep, but Porter was sitting up, and close beside him sat the girl. Her coiled hair was loosened, and fallen over her shoulders. There was no sign of drowsiness in her wide-open eyes as they stared at the door between the two rooms. McKay could see her hand clasping Porter’s arm. Porter was talking, with his face so close to her bent head that his lips touched her hair, and though Jolly Roger could understand no word that was spoken he knew Porter was whispering the exciting secret of his identity to Josephine Tavish. He could see, for a moment, a shadow of protest in her face, he could hear the quick, sibilant whisper of her voice, and Porter cautioned her with a finger at her lips, and made a gesture toward the sleeping Tavish. Then his fingers closed about her uncoiled hair as he drew her to him. McKay watched the long kiss between them. The girl drew away quickly then, and Porter tucked the blanket about her when she lay down beside her father. After that he stretched out again beside Breault.

Jolly Roger guessed what had happened. The girl had awakened, a bit nervous, and had roused Porter and asked him to relight the alcohol lamp. And Porter had taken advantage of the opportunity to tell her of the interesting discovery which Breault had made–and to kiss her. McKay stroked Peter’s scrawny neck, and listened. He could no longer hear the storm, and he wondered if the fury of it was spent.

Every few minutes he looked through the slit in the snow wall. The last time, half an hour after Porter had returned to his blanket, Josephine Tavish was sitting up. She was very wide awake. McKay watched her as she rose slowly to her knees, and then to her feet. She bent over Porter and Breault to make sure they were asleep, and then came straight toward the door of his room.

He lay back on his blanket, with the fingers of one hand gripped closely about Peter.

“Be quiet, boy,” he whispered. “Be quiet.”

He could see the shutting out of light at his door as the girl stood there, listening for his breathing. He breathed heavily, and before he closed his eyes he saw Josephine Tavish coming toward him. In a moment she was bending over him. He could feel the soft caress of her loose hair on his face and hands. Then she knelt quietly down beside him, stroking Peter with her hand, and shook him lightly by the shoulder.

“Jolly Roger!” she whispered. “Jolly Roger McKay!”

He opened his eyes, looking up at the white face in the gloom.

“Yes,” he replied softly. “What is it, Miss Tavish?”

He could hear the choking breath in her throat as her fingers tightened at his shoulder. She bent her face still nearer to him, until her hair cluttered his throat and breast.

“You are–awake?”

“Yes.”

“Then–listen to me. If you are Jolly Roger McKay you must get away–somewhere. You must go before Breault awakens in the morning. I think the storm is over–there is no wind–and if you are here when day comes–“

Her fingers loosened. Jolly Roger reached out and somewhere in the darkness he found her hand. It clasped his own–firm, warm, thrilling.

“I thank you for what you have done,” she whispered. “But the law –and Breault–they have no mercy!”

She was gone, swiftly and silently, and McKay looked through the slit in the wall until she was with her father again.

In the gloom he drew Peter close to him.

“We’re up against it again, Pied-Bot,” he confided under his breath. “We’ve got to take another chance.”

He worked without sound, and in a quarter of an hour his pack was ready, and the entrance to his tunnel dug out. He went into the outer room then, where Josephine Tavish was awake. Jolly Roger pantomimed his desire as she sat up. He wanted something from one of the packs. She nodded. On his knees he fumbled in the dunnage, and when he rose to his feet, facing the girl, her eyes opened wide at what he held in his hand–a small packet of old newspapers her father was taking to the factor at Fort Churchill. She saw the hungry, apologetic look in his eyes, and her woman’s heart understood. She smiled gently at him, and her lips formed an unvoiced whisper of gratitude as he turned to go. At the door he looked back. He thought she was beautiful then, with her shining hair and eyes, and her lips parted, and her hands half reaching out to him, as if in that moment of parting she was giving him courage and faith. Suddenly she pressed the palms of her fingers to her mouth and sent the kiss of benediction to him through the twilight glow of the snow-room.

A moment later, crawling through his tunnel with Peter close behind him, there was an exultant singing in Jolly Roger’s heart. Again he was fleeing from the law, but always, as Yellow Bird had predicted in her sorcery, there were happiness and hope in his going. And always there was someone to urge him on, and to take a pride in him, like Josephine Tavish.

He broke through the dune-crust at the end of his tunnel and crawled out into the thick, gray dawn of a barren-land day. The sky was heavy overhead, and the wind had died out. It was the beginning of the brief lull which came in the second day of the Great Storm.

McKay laughed softly as he sensed the odds against them.

“We’ll be having the storm at our heels again before long, Pied- Bot,” he said. “We’d better make for the timber a dozen miles south.”

He struck out, circling the dune, so that he was traveling straight away from the first hole he had cut through the shell of the drift. From that door, made by the outlaw who had saved them, Josephine Tavish watched the shadowy forms of man and dog until they were lost in the gray-white chaos of a frozen world.

CHAPTER XV

Through the blizzard Jolly Roger made his way a score of miles southward from the big dune on the Barren. For a day and a night he made his camp in the scrub timber which edged the vast treeless tundras reaching to the Arctic. He believed he was safe, for the unceasing wind and the blasts of shot-like snow filled his tracks a few moments after they were made. He struck a straight line for his cabin after that first day and night in the scrub timber. The storm was still a thing of terrific force out on the barren, but in the timber he was fairly well sheltered. He was convinced the police patrol would find his cabin very soon after the storm had worn itself out. Porter and Tavish did not trouble him. But from Breault he knew there was no getting away. Breault would nose out his cabin. And for that reason he was determined to reach it first.

The second night he did not sleep. His mind was a wild thing–wild as a Loup-Garou seeking out its ghostly trails; it passed beyond his mastery, keeping sleep away from him though he was dead tired. It carried him back over all the steps of his outlawry, visioning for him the score of times he had escaped, as he was narrowly escaping now; and it pictured for him, like a creature of inquisition, the tightening net ahead of him, the final futility of all his effort. And at last, as if moved by pity to ease his suffering a little, it brought him back vividly to the green valley, the flowers and the blue skies of Cragg’s Ridge–and Nada.

It was like a dream. At times he could scarcely assure himself that he had actually lived those weeks and months of happiness down on the edge of civilization; it seemed impossible that Nada had come like an Angel into his life down there, and that she had loved him, even when he confessed himself a fugitive from the law and had entreated him to take her with him. He closed his eyes and that last roaring night of storm at Cragg’s Ridge was about him again. He was in the little old Missioner’s cabin, with thunder and lightning rending earth and sky outside and Nada was in his arms, her lips against his, the piteous heartbreak of despair in her eyes. Then he saw her–a moment later–a crumpled heap down beside the chair, the disheveled glory of her hair hiding her white face from him as he hesitated for a single instant before opening the door and plunging out into the night.

With a cry he sprang up, dashing the vision from him, and threw fresh fuel on the fire. And he cried out the same old thought to Peter.

“It would have been murder for us to bring her, Pied-Bot. It would have been murder!”

He looked about him at the swirling chaos outside the rim of light made by his fire and listened to the moaning of the wind over the treetops. Beyond the circle of light the dry snow, which crunched like sand under his feet, was lost in ghostly gloom. It was forty degrees below zero. And he was glad, even with this sickness of despair in his heart, that she was not a fugitive with him tonight.

Yet he built up a little make-believe world for himself as he sat with a blanket hugged close about him, staring into the fire. In a hundred different ways he saw her face, a will-o-the-wisp thing amid the flames; an illusive, very girlish, almost childish face– yet always with the light of a woman’s soul shining in it. That was the miracle which startled him at last. It seemed as if the fiction he built up in his despair transformed itself subtly into fact and that her soul had come to him from out of the southland and was speaking to him with eyes which never changed or faltered in their adoration, their faith and their courage. She seemed to come to him, to creep into his arms under the folds of the blanket and he sensed the soft crush of her hair, the touch of her lips, the warm encircling of her arms about his neck. Closer to him pressed the mystery, until the beating of her heart was a living pulse against him; and then–suddenly, as an irresistible impulse closed his arms to hold the spirit to him, his eyes were drawn to the heart of the fire, and he saw there for an instant, wide-eyed and speaking to him, the face of Yellow Bird the Indian sorceress. The flames crept up the long braids of her hair, her lips moved, and then she was gone–but slowly, like a ghost slipping upward into the mist of smoke and night.

Peter heard his master’s cry. And after that Jolly Roger rose up and threw off the blanket and walked back and forth until his feet trod a path in the snow. He told himself it was madness to believe, and yet he believed. Faith fought itself back into that dark citadel of his heart from which for a time it had been driven. New courage lighted up again the black chaos of his soul. And at last he fell down on his knees and gripped Peter’s shaggy head between his two hands.

“Pied-Bot, she said everything would come out right in the end,” he cried, a new note in his voice. “That’s what Yellow Bird told us, wasn’t it? Mebby they would have burned her as a witch a long time ago because she’s a sorceress, and says she can send her soul out of her body and see what we can’t see. BUT WE BELIEVE!” His voice choked up, and he laughed. “They were both here tonight,” he added. “Nada–and Yellow Bird. And I believe–I believe–I know what it means!”

He stood up again, and Peter saw the old smile on his master’s lips as Jolly Roger looked up into the swirling black canopy of the spruce-tops. And the wailing of the storm seemed no longer to hold menace and taunt, but in it he heard the whisper of fierce, strong voices urging upon him the conviction that had already swept indecision from his heart.

And then he said, holding out his arms as if encompassing something which he could not see.

“Peter, we’re going back to Nada!”

Dawn was a scarcely perceptible thing when it came. Darkness seemed to fade a little, that was all. Frosty shapes took form in the gloom, and the spruce-tops became tangible in an abyss of sepulchral shadow overhead.

Through this beginning of the barren-land day Jolly Roger set out in the direction of his cabin and in his blood was that new singing thing of fire and warmth that more than made up for the hours of sleep he had lost during the night. The storm was dying out, he thought, and it was growing warmer; yet the wind whistled and raved in the open spaces and his thermometer registered the fortieth and a fraction degree below zero. The air he breathed was softer, he fancied, yet it was still heavy with the stinging shot of blizzard; and where yesterday he had seen only the smothering chaos of twisted spruce and piled up snow, there was now–as the pale day broadened–his old wonderland of savage beauty, awaiting only a flash of sunlight to transform it into the pure glory of a thing indescribable. But the sun did not come and Jolly Roger did not miss it over-much for his heart was full of Nada, and a-thrill with the inspiration of his home-going.

“That’s what it means, GOING HOME” he said to Peter, who nosed close in the path of his snowshoes. “There’s a thousand miles between us and Cragg’s Ridge, a thousand miles of snow and ice– and hell, mebby. But we’ll make it!”

He was sure of himself now. It was as if he had come up from out of the shadow of a great sickness. He had been unwise. He had not reasoned as a man should reason. The hangman might be waiting for him at Cragg’s Ridge, down on the rim of civilization, but that same grim executioner was also pursuing close at his heels. He would always be pursuing in the form of a Breault, a Cassidy, a Tavish, or a Somebody Else of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. It would be that way until the end came. And when the end did come, when they finally got him, the blow would be easier at Cragg’s Ridge than up here on the edge of the Barren Land.

And again there was hope, a wild, almost unbelievable hope that with Nada he might find that place which Yellow Bird, the sorceress, had promised for them–that mystery-place of safety and of happiness which she had called The Country Beyond, where “all would end well.” He had not the faith of Yellow Bird’s people; he was not superstitious enough to believe fully in her sorcery, except that he seized upon it as a drowning man might grip at a floating sea-weed. Yet was the under-current of hope so persistent that at times it was near faith. Up to this hour Yellow Bird’s sorcery had brought him nothing but the truth. For him she had conjured the spirits of her people, and these spirits, speaking through Yellow Bird’s lips, had saved him from Cassidy at the fishing camp and had performed the miracle on the shore of Wollaston and had predicted the salvation that had come to him out on the Barren. And so–was it not conceivable that the other would also come true?

But these visions came to him only in flashes. As he traveled through the hours the one vital desire of his being was to bring himself physically into the presence of Nada, to feel the wild joy of her in his arms once more, the crush of her lips to his, the caress of her hands in their old sweet way at his face–and to hear her voice, the girl’s voice with the woman’s soul behind it, crying out its undying love, as he had last heard it that night in the Missioner’s cabin many months ago. After this had happened, then–if fate decreed it so–all other things might end. Breault, the Ferret, might come. Or Porter. Or that Somebody Else who was always on his trail. If the game finished thus, he would be satisfied.

When he stopped to make a pot of black tea and warm a snack to eat Jolly Roger tried to explain this new meaning of life to Peter.

“The big thing we must do is to get there–safely,” he said, already beginning to make plans in the back of his head. And then he went on, building up his fabric of new hope before Peter, while he crunched his luncheon of toasted bannock and fat bacon. There was something joyous and definite in his voice which entered into Peter’s blood and body. There was even a note of excitement in it, and Peter’s whiskers bristled with fresh courage and his eyes gleamed and his tail thumped the snow comprehendingly. It was like having a master come back to him from the dead.

And Jolly Roger even laughed, softly, under his breath.

“This is February,” he said. “We ought to make it late in March. I mean Cragg’s Ridge, Pied-Bot.”

After that they went on, traveling hard to reach their cabin before the darkness of night, which would drop upon them like a thick blanket at four o’clock. In these last hours there pressed even more heavily upon Jolly Roger that growing realization of the vastness and emptiness of the world. It was as if blindness had dropped from his eyes and he saw the naked truth at last. Out of this world everything had emptied itself until it held only Nada. Only she counted. Only she held out her arms to him, entreating him to keep for her that life in his body which meant so little in all other ways. He thought of one of the little worn books which he carried in his shoulder-pack–Jeanne D’Arc. As she had fought, with the guidance of God, so he believed the blue-eyed girl down at Cragg’s Ridge was fighting for him, and had sent her spirit out in quest of him. And he was going back to her. GOING!

The last word, as it came from his lips, meant that nothing would stop them. He almost shouted it. And Peter answered.

In spite of their effort, darkness closed in on them. With the first dusk of this night there came sudden lulls in which the blizzard seemed to have exhausted itself. Jolly Roger read the signs. By tomorrow there would be no storm and Breault the Ferret would be on the trail again, along with Porter and Tavish.

It was his old craft, his old cunning, that urged him to go on. Strangely, he prayed for the blizzard not to give up the ghost. Something must be accomplished before its fury was spent; and he was glad when after each lull he heard again the moaning and screeching of it over the open spaces, and the slashing together of spruce tops where there was cover. In a chaos of gloom they came to the low ridge which reached across an open sweep of tundra to the finger of shelter where the cabin was built. An hour later they were at its door. Jolly Roger opened it and staggered in. For a space he stood leaning against the wall while his lungs drank in the warmer air. The intake of his breath made a whistling sound and he was surprised to find himself so near exhaustion. He heard the thud of Peter’s body as it collapsed to the floor.

“Tired, Pied-Bot?”

It was difficult for his storm-beaten lips to speak the words.

Peter thumped his tail. The rat-tap-tap of it came in one of those lulls of the storm which Jolly Roger had begun to dread.

“I hope it keeps up another two hours,” he said, wetting his lips to take the stiffness out of them. “If it doesn’t–“

He was thinking of Breault as he drew off his mittens and fumbled for a match. It was Breault he feared. The Ferret would find his cabin and his trail if the storm died out too soon.

He lighted the tin lamp on his table and after that, assured that wastefulness would cost him nothing now, he set two bear-drip candles going, one at each end of the cabin. The illumination filled the single room. There was little for it to reveal–the table he had made, a chair, a battered little sheet-iron stove, and the humped up blanket in his bunk, under which he had stored the remainder of his possessions. Back of the stove was a pile of dry wood, and in another five minutes the roar of flames in the chimney mingled with a fresh bluster of the wind outside.

Defying the exhaustion of limbs and body, Jolly Roger kept steadily at work. He threw off his heavier garments as the freezing atmosphere of the room became warmer, and prepared for a feast.

“We’ll call it Christmas, and have everything we’ve got, Pied-Bot. We’ll cook a quart of prunes instead of six. No use stinting ourselves–tonight!”

Even Peter was amazed at the prodigality of his master. An hour later they ate, and McKay drank a quart of hot coffee before he was done. Half of his fatigue was gone and he sat back for a few minutes to finish off with the luxury of his pipe. Peter, gorged with caribou meat, stretched himself out to sleep. But his eyes did not close. His master puzzled him. For after a little Jolly Roger put on his heavy coat and parkee and pocketed his pipe. After that he slipped the straps of his pack over head and shoulders and then, even more to Peter’s bewilderment, emptied a quart bottle of kerosene over the pile of dry wood behind the hot stove. To this he touched a lighted match. His next movement drew from Peter a startled yelp. With a single thrust of his foot he sent the stove crashing into the middle of the floor.

Half an hour later, when Peter and Jolly Roger looked back from the crest of the ridge, a red pillar of flame lighted up the gloomy chaos of the unpeopled world they were leaving behind them. The wind was driving fiercely from the Barren and with it came stinging volleys of the fine drift-snow. In the teeth of it Roger McKay stared back.

“It’s a good fire,” he mumbled in his hood. “Half an hour and it will be out. There’ll be nothing for Breault to find if this wind keeps up another two hours–nothing but drift-snow, with no sign of trail or cabin.”

He struck out, leaving the shelter of the ridge. Straight south he went, keeping always in the open spaces where the wind-swept drift covered his snowshoe trail almost as soon as it was made. Darkness did not trouble him now. The open barren was ahead, miles of it, while only a little to the westward was the shelter of timber. Twice he blundered to the edge of this timber, but quickly set his course again in the open, with the wind always quartering at his back. He could only guess how long he kept on. The time came when he began to count the swing of his snowshoes, measuring off half a mile, or a mile, and then beginning over again until at last the achievement of five hundred steps seemed to take an immeasurable length of time and great effort. Like the ache of a tooth came the first warning of snowshoe cramp in his legs. In the black night he grinned. He knew what it meant–a warning as deadly as swimmer’s cramp in deep water. If he continued much longer he would be crawling on his hands and knees.

Quickly he turned in the direction of the timber. He had traveled three hours, he thought, since abandoning his cabin to the flames. Another half hour, with the caution of slower, shorter steps, brought him to the timber. Luck was with him and he cried aloud to Peter as he felt himself in the darkness of a dense cover of spruce and balsam. He freed himself from his entangled snowshoes and went on deeper into the shelter. It became warmer and they could feel no longer a breath of the wind.

He unloaded his pack and drew from it a jackpine torch, dried in his cabin and heavy with pitch. Shortly the flare of this torch lighted up their refuge for a dozen paces about them. In the illumination of it, moving it from place to place, he gathered dry fire wood and with his axe cut down green spruce for the smouldering back-fire that would last until morning. By the time the torch had consumed itself the fire was burning, and where Jolly Roger had scraped away the snow from the thick carpet of spruce needles underfoot he piled a thick mass of balsam boughs, and in the center of the bed he buried himself, wrapped warmly in his blankets, and with Peter snuggled close at his side.

Through dark hours the green spruce fire burned slowly and steadily. For a long time there was wailing of wind out in the open. But at last it died away, and utter stillness filled the world. No life moved in these hours which followed the giving up of the big storm’s last gasping breath. Slowly the sky cleared. Here and there a star burned through. But Jolly Roger and Peter, deep in the sleep of exhaustion, knew nothing of the change.

CHAPTER XVI

It was Peter who roused Jolly Roger many hours later; Peter nosing about the still burning embers of the fire, and at last muzzling his master’s face with increasing anxiety. McKay sat up out of his nest of balsam boughs and blankets and caught the bright glint of sunlight through the treetops. He rubbed his eyes and stared again to make sure. Then he looked at his watch. It was ten o’clock and peering in the direction of the open he saw the white edge of it glistening in the unclouded blaze of a sun. 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. He had almost forgotten but it came back to him now. It was the old Jolly Roger–the old master come to life again.

In the clear stillness of the morning one might have heard that shouting song half a mile away. But McKay was no longer afraid. As the storm seemed to have cleaned the world so the sun cleared his soul of its last shadow of doubt. It was not merely an omen or a promise, but for him proclaimed a certainty. God was with him. Life was with him. His world was opening its arms to him again– and he sang as if Nada was only a mile away from him instead of a thousand.

When he went on, after their breakfast, he laughed at the thought of Breault discovering their trail. The Ferret would be more than human to do that after what wind and storm and fire had done for them.

This first day of their pilgrimage into the southland was a day of glory from its beginning until the setting of the sun. There was no cloud in the sky. And it grew warmer, until Jolly Roger flung back the hood of his parkee and turned up the fur of his cap. That night a million stars lighted the heaven.

After this first day and night nothing could break down the hope and confidence of Jolly Roger and his, dog. Peter knew they were going south, in which direction lay everything he had ever yearned for; and each night beside their campfire McKay made a note with pencil and paper and measured the distance they had come and the distance they had yet to go. Hope in a little while became certainty. Into his mind urged no thought of changes that might have taken place at Cragg’s Ridge; or, if the thought did come, it caused him no uneasiness. Now that Jed Hawkins was dead Nada would be with the little old Missioner in whose care he had left her, and not for an instant did a doubt cloud the growing happiness of his anticipations. Breault and the hunters of the law were the one worry that lay ahead and behind him. If he outwitted them he would find Nada waiting for him.

Day after day they kept south and west until they struck the Thelon; and then through a country unmapped, and at times terrific in its cold and storm, they fought steadily to the frozen regions of the Dubawnt waterways. Only once in the first three weeks did they seek human company. This was at a small Indian camp where Jolly Roger bartered for caribou meat and moccasins for Peter’s feet. Twice between there and God’s Lake they stopped at trappers’ cabins.

It was early in March when they struck the Lost Lake country, three hundred miles from Cragg’s Ridge.

And here it was, buried under a blind of soft snow, that Peter nosed out the frozen carcass of a disemboweled buck which Boileau, the French trapper, had poisoned for wolves. Jolly Roger had built a fire and was warming half a pint of deer tallow for a baking of bannock, when Peter dragged himself in, his rear legs already stiffening with the palsy of strychnine. In a dozen seconds McKay had the warm tallow down Peter’s throat, to the last drop of it; and this he followed with another dose as quickly as he could heat it, and in the end Peter gave up what he had eaten.

Half an hour later Boileau, who was eating his dinner, jumped up in wonderment when the door of his cabin was suddenly opened by a grim and white-faced man who carried the limp body of a dog in his arms.

For a long time after this the shadow of death hung over the Frenchman’s trapping-shack. To Boileau, with his brotherly sympathy and regret that his poison-bait had brought calamity, Peter was “just dog.” But when at last he saw the strong shoulders of the grim-faced stranger shaking over Peter’s paralyzed body and listened to the sobbing grief that broke in passionate protest from his white lips, he drew back a little awed. It seemed for a time that Peter was dead; and in those moments Jolly Roger put his arms about him and buried his despairing face in Peter’s scraggly neck, calling in a wild fit of anguish for him to come back, to live, to open his eyes again. Boileau, crossing himself, felt of Peter’s body and McKay heard his voice over him, saying that the dog was not dead, but that his heart was beating steadily and that he thought the last stiffening blow of the poison was over. To McKay it was like bringing the dead back to life. He raised his head and drew away his arms and knelt beside the bunk stunned and mutely hopeful while Boileau took his place and began dropping warm condensed milk down Peter’s throat. In a little while Peter’s eyes opened and he gave a great sigh.

Boileau looked up and shrugged his shoulders.

“That was a good breath, m’sieu,” he said. “What is left of the poison has done its worst. He will live.”

A bit stupidly McKay rose to his feet. He swayed a little, and for the first time sensed the hot tears that had blinded his eyes and wet his cheeks. And then there came a sobbing laugh out of his throat and he went to the window of the Frenchman’s shack and stared out into the white world, seeing nothing. He had stood in the presence of death many times before but never had that presence choked up his heart as in this hour when the soul of Peter, his comrade, had stood falteringly for a space half-way between the living and the dead.

When he turned from the window Boileau was covering Peter’s body with blankets and a warm bear skin. And for many days thereafter Peter was nursed through the slow sickness which followed.

An early spring came this year in the northland. South of the Reindeer waterway country the snows were disappearing late in March and ice was rotting the first week in April. Winds came from the south and west and the sun was warmer and clearer than Boileau had ever known it at the winter’s end in Lost Lake country. It was in this first week of April that Peter was able to travel, and McKay pointed his trail once more for Cragg’s Ridge

He left a part of his winter dunnage at Boileau’s shack and went on light, figuring to reach Cragg’s Ridge before the new “goose moon” had worn itself out in the west. But for a week Peter lagged and until the darker red in the rims of his eyes cleared away Jolly Roger checked the impetus of his travel so that the goose moon had faded out and the “frog moon” of May was in its full before they came down the last slope that dipped from the Height of Land to the forests and lakes of the lower country.

And now, in these days, it seemed to Jolly Roger that a great kindness, and not tragedy, had delayed him so that his “home coming” was in the gladness of spring. All about him was the sweetness and mystic whispering of new life just awakening. It was in the sky and the sun; it was underfoot, in the fragrance of the mold he trod upon, in the trees about him, and in the mate- chirping of the birds flocking back from the southland. His friends the jays were raucous and jaunty again, bullying and bluffing in the warmth of sunshine; the black glint of crows’ wings flashed across the opens; the wood-sappers and pewees and big-eyed moose-birds were aflutter with the excitement of home planning; partridges were feasting on the swelling poplar buds– and then, one glorious sunset, he heard the chirruping evening song of his first robin.

And the next day they would reach Cragg’s Ridge!

Half of that last night he sat up, awake, or smoked in the glow of his fire, waiting for the dawn. With the first lifting of darkness he was traveling swiftly ahead of Peter and the morning was only half gone when he saw far ahead of him the great ridge which shut out Indian Tom’s swamp, and Nada’s plain, and Cragg’s Ridge beyond it.

It was noon when he stood at the crest of this. He was breathing hard, for to reach this last precious height from which he might look upon the country of Nada’s home he had half run up its rock- strewn side. There, with his lungs gasping for air, his eager eyes shot over the country below him and for a moment the significance of the thing which he saw did not strike him. And then in another instant it seemed that his heart choked up, like a fist suddenly tightened, and stopped its beating.

Reaching away from him, miles upon miles of it, east, west and south–was a dead and char-stricken world.

Up to the foot of the ridge itself had come the devastation of flame, and where it had swept, months ago, there was now no sign of the glorious spring that lay behind him.

He looked for Indian Tom’s swamp, and where it had been there was no longer a swamp but a stricken chaos of ten thousand black stubs, the shriven corpses of the spruce and cedar and jackpines out of which the wolves had howled at night.

He looked for the timber on Sucker Creek where the little old Missioner’s cabin lay, and where he had dreamed that Nada would be waiting for him. And he saw no timber there but only the littleness and emptiness of a blackened world.

And then he looked to Cragg’s Ridge, and along the bald crest of it, naked as death, he saw blackened stubs pointing skyward, painting desolation against the blue of the heaven beyond.

A cry came from him, a cry of fear and of horror, for he was looking upon the fulfilment of Yellow Bird’s prediction. He seemed to hear, whispering softly in his ears, the low, sweet voice of the sorceress, as on the night when she had told him that if he returned to Cragg’s Ridge he would find a world that had turned black with ruin and that it would not be there he would ever find Nada.

After that one sobbing cry he tore like a madman dawn into the valley, traveling swiftly through the muck of fire and under-foot tangle with Peter fighting behind him. Half an hour later he stood where the Missioner’s cabin had been and he found only a ruin of ash and logs burned down to the earth. Where the trail had run there was no longer a trail. A blight, grim and sickening, lay upon the earth that had been paradise.

Peter heard the choking sound in his master’s throat and chest. He, too, sensed the black shadow of tragedy and cautiously he sniffed the air, knowing that at last they were home–and yet it was not home. Instinctively he had faced Cragg’s Ridge and Jolly Roger, seeing the dog’s stiffened body pointing toward the break beyond which lay Nada’s old home, felt a thrill of hope leap up within him. Possibly the farther plain had escaped the scourge of fire. If so, Nada would be there, and the Missioner–

He started for the break, a mile away. As he came nearer to it his hope grew less for he could see where the flames had swept in an inundating sea along Cragg’s Ridge. They passed over the meadow where the thick young jackpines, the red strawberries and the blue violets had been and Peter heard the strange sob when they came to the little hollow–the old trysting place where Nada had first given herself into his master’s arms. And there it was that Peter forgot master and caution and sped swiftly ahead to the break that cut the Ridge in twain.

When Jolly Roger came to that break and ran through it he was staggering from the mad effort he had made. And then, all at once, the last of his wind came in a cry of gladness. He swayed against a rock and stood there staring wild-eyed at what was before him. The world was as black ahead of him as it was behind. But Jed Hawkins’ cabin was untouched! The fire had crept up to its very door and there it had died.

He went on the remaining hundred yards and before the closed door of Nada’s old home he found Peter standing stiff-legged and strange. He opened the door and a damp chill touched his face. The cabin was empty. And the gloom and desolation of a grave filled the place.

He stepped in, a moaning whisper of the truth coming to his lips. He heard the scurrying flight of a starved wood-rat, a flutter of loose papers, and then the silence of death fell about him. The door of Nada’s little room was open and he entered through it. The bed was naked and there remained only the skeleton of things that had been.

He moved now like a man numbed by a strange sickness and Peter followed gloomily and silently in the footsteps of his master. They went outside and a distance away Jolly Roger saw a thing rising up out of the char of fire, ugly and foreboding, like the evil spirit of desolation itself. It was a rude cross made of saplings, up which the flames had licked their way, searing it grim and black.

His hands clenched slowly for he knew that under the cross lay the body of Jed Hawkins, the fiend who had destroyed his world.

After that he re-entered the cabin and went into Nada’s room, closing the door behind him; and for many minutes thereafter Peter remained outside guarding the outer door, and hearing no sound or movement from within.

When Jolly Roger came out his face was set and white, and he looked where the thick forest had stood on that stormy night when he ran down the trail toward Mooney’s cabin. There was no forest now. But he found the old tie-cutters’ road, cluttered as it was with the debris of fire, and he knew when he came to that twist in the trail where long ago Jed Hawkins had lain dead on his back. Half a mile beyond he came to the railroad. Here it was that the fire had burned hottest, for as far as his vision went he could see no sign of life or of forest green alight in the waning sun.

And now there fell upon him, along with the desolation of despair, a something grimmer and more terrible–a thing that was fear. About him everywhere reached this graveyard of death, leaving no spot untouched. Was it possible that Nada and the Missioner had not escaped its fury? The fear settled upon him more heavily as the sun went down and the gloom of evening came, bringing with it an unpleasant chill and a cloying odor of things burned dead.

He did not talk to Peter now. There was a lamp in the cabin and wood behind the stove, and silently he built a fire and trimmed and lighted the wick when darkness came. And Peter, as if hiding from the ghosts of yesterday, slunk into a corner and lay there unmoving and still. And McKay did not get supper nor did he smoke, but after a long time he carried his blankets into Nada’s room, and spread them out upon her bed. Then he put out the light and quietly laid himself down where through the nights of many a month and year Nada had slept in the moon glow.

The moon was there tonight. The faint glow of it rose in the east and swiftly it climbed over the ragged shoulder of Cragg’s Ridge, flooding the blackened world with light and filling the room with a soft and golden radiance. It was a moon undimmed, full and round and yellow; and it seemed to smile in through the window as if some living spirit in it had not yet missed Nada, and was embracing her in its glory. And now it came upon Jolly Roger why she had loved it even more than she had loved the sun; for through the little window it shut out all the rest of the world, and sitting up, he seemed to hear her heart beating at his side and clearly he saw her face in the light of it and her slim arms out- reaching, as if to gather it to her breast. Thus–many times, she had told him–had she sat up in her bed to greet the moon and to look for the smiling face that was almost always there, the face of the Man in the Moon, her friend and playmate in the sky.

For a space his heart leapt up; and then, as if discovery of the usurper in her room had come, a cloud swept over the face of the moon like a mighty hand and darkness crowded him in. But the cloud sailed on and the light drove out the gloom again. Then it was that Jolly Roger saw the Old Man in the Moon was up and awake tonight, for never had he seen his face more clearly. Often had Nada pointed it out to him in her adorable faith that the Old Man loved her, telling him how this feature changed and that feature changed, how sometimes the Old Man looked sick and at others well, and how there were times when he smiled and was happy and other times when he was sad and stern and sat there in his castle in the sky sunk in a mysterious grief which she could not understand.

“And always I can tell whether I’m going to be glad or sorry by the look of the Man in the Moon,” she had said to him. “He looks down and tells me even when the clouds are thick and he can only peep through now and then. And he knows a lot about you, Mister– Jolly Roger–because I’ve told him everything.”

Very quietly Jolly Roger got up from the bed and very strange seemed his manner to Peter as he walked through the outer room and into the night beyond. There he stood making no sound or movement, like one of the lifeless stubs left by fire; and Peter looked up, as his master was looking, trying to make out what it was he saw in the sky. And nothing was there–nothing that he had not seen many times before; a billion stars, and the moon riding King among them all, and fleecy clouds as if made of web, and stillness, a great stillness that was like sleep in the lap of the world.

For a little Jolly Roger was silent and then Peter heard him saying,

“Yellow Bird was right–again. She said we’d find a black world down here and we’ve found it. And we’re going to find Nada where she told us we’d find her, in that place she called The Country Beyond–the country beyond the forests, beyond the tall trees and the big swamps, beyond everything we’ve ever known of the wild and open spaces; the country where God lives in churches on Sunday and where people would laugh at some of our queer notions, Pied-Bot. It’s there we’ll find Nada, driven out by the fire, and waiting for us now in the settlements.”

He spoke with a strange and quiet conviction, the haggard look dying out of his face as he stared up into the splendor of the sky.

And then he said.

“We won’t sleep tonight, Peter. We’ll travel with the moon.”

Half an hour later, as the lonely figures of man and dog headed for the first settlement a dozen miles away, there seemed to come for an instant the flash of a satisfied smile in the face of the Man in the sky.

CHAPTER XVII

From the cabin McKay went first to the great rock that jutted from the broken shoulder of Cragg’s Ridge, and as they stood there Peter heard the strange something that was like a laugh, and yet was not a laugh, on his master’s lips. But his scraggly face did not look up. There was an answering whimper in his throat. He had been slow in sensing the significance of the mysterious thing that had changed his old home since months ago. During the hours of afternoon, and these moonlit hours that followed, he tried to understand. He knew this was home. Yet the green grass was gone, and a million trees had changed into blackened stubs. The world was no longer shut in by deep forests. And Cragg’s Ridge was naked where he and Nada had romped in sunshine and flowers, and out of it all rose the mucky death-smell of the flame-swept earth. These things he understood, in his dog way. But what he could not understand clearly was why Nada was not in the cabin, and why they did not find her, even though the world was changed.

He sat back on his haunches, and Jolly Roger heard again the whimpering grief in his throat. It comforted the man to know that Peter remembered, and he was not alone in his desolation. Gently he placed a soot-grimed hand on his comrade’s head.

“Peter, it was from this rock–right where we’re standing now– that I first saw her, a long time ago,” he said, a bit of forced cheer breaking through the huskiness of his voice. “Remember the little jackpine clump down there? You climbed up onto her lap, a little know-nothing thing, and you pawed in her loose curls, and growled so fiercely I could hear you. And when I made a noise, and she looked up, I thought she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen–just a kid, with those eyes like the flowers, and her hair shining in the sun, an’ tear stains on her cheeks. Tear stains, Pied-Bot–because of that snake who’s dead over there. Remember how you growled at me, Peter?”

Peter wriggled an answer.

“That was the beginning,” said Jolly Roger, “and this–looks like the end. But–“

He clenched his fists, and there was a sudden fierceness in the grotesque movement of his shadow on the rock.

“We’re going to find her before that end comes,” he added defiantly. “We’re going to find her, Pied-Bot, even if it takes us to the settlements–right up into the face of the law.”

He set out over the rocks, his boots making hollow sounds in the deadness of the world about them. Again he followed where once had been the trail that led to Mooney’s shack, over on the wobbly line of rail that rambled for eighty miles into the wilderness from Fort William. The P. D. & W. it was named–Port Arthur, Duluth & Western; but it had never reached Duluth, and there were those who had nicknamed it Poverty, Destruction & Want. Many times Jolly Roger had laughed at the queer stories Nada told him about it; how a wrecking outfit was always carried behind on the twice-a-week train, and how the crew picked berries in season, and had their trapping lines, and once chased a bear half way to Whitefish Lake while the train waited for hours. She called it the “Cannon Ball,” because once upon a time it had made sixty-nine miles in twenty- four hours. But there was nothing of humor about it as Jolly Roger and Peter came out upon it tonight. It stretched out both ways from them, a thin, grim line of tragedy in the moonlight, and from where they stood it appeared to reach into a black and abysmal sea.

Once more man and dog paused, and looked back at what had been. And the whine came in Peter’s throat again and something tugged inside him, urging him to bark up into the face of the moon, as he had often barked for Nada in the days of his puppyhood, and afterward.

But his master went on and Peter followed him, stepping the uneven ties one by one. And with the black chaos of the world under and about them, and the glorious light of the moon filling; the sky over their heads, the journey they made seemed weirdly unreal. For the silver and gold of the moon and the black muck of the fire refused to mingle, and while over their heads they could see the tiniest clouds and beyond to the farthest stars, all was black emptiness when they looked about them upon what once had been a living earth. Only the two lines of steel caught the moon-glow and the charred ends of the fire-shriven stubs that rose up out of the earth shroud and silhouetted themselves against the sky.

To Peter it was not what he failed to see, but what he did not hear or smell that oppressed him and stirred him to wide-eyed watchfulness against impending evil. Under many moons he had traveled with his master in their never-ending flight from the law, and many other nights with neither moon nor stars had they felt out their trails together. But always, under him and over him on all sides of him, there had been LIFE. And tonight there was no life, nor smell of life. There was no chirp of night bird, or flutter of owl’s wing, no plash of duck or cry of loon. He listened in vain for the crinkling snap of twig, and the whisper of wind in treetops. And there was no smell–no musk of mink that had crossed his path, no taste in the air of the strong scented fox, no subtle breath of partridge and rabbit and fleshy porcupine. And even from the far distances there came no sound, no howl of wolf, no castanet clatter of stout moose horns against bending saplings–not even the howl of a trapper’s dog.

The stillness was of the earth, and yet unearthly. It was even as if some fearsome thing was smothering the sound of his master’s feet. To McKay, sensing these same things that Peter sensed, came understanding that brought with it an uneasiness which changed swiftly into the chill of a growing fear. The utter lifelessness told him how vast the destruction of the fire had been. Its obliteration was so great no life had adventured back into the desolated country, though the conflagration must have passed in the preceding autumn, many months ago. The burned country was a grave and the nearest edge of it, judged from the sepulchral stillness of the night, was many miles away.

For the first time came the horror of the thought that in such a fire as this people must have died. It had swept upon them like a tidal wave, galloping the forests with the speed of a race horse, with only this thin line of rail leading to the freedom of life outside. In places only a miracle could have made escape possible. And here, where Nada had lived, with the pitch-wood forests crowding close, the fire must have burned most fiercely. In this moment, when fear of the unspeakable set his heart trembling, his faith fastened itself grimly to the little old gray Missioner, Father John, in whose cabin Nada had taken refuge many months ago, when Jed Hawkins lay dead in the trail with his one-eyed face turned up to the thunder and lightning in the sky. Father John, on that stormy night when he fled north, had promised to care for Nada, and in silence he breathed a prayer that the Missioner had saved her from the red death that had swept like an avalanche upon them. He told himself it must be so. He cried out the words aloud, and Peter heard him, and followed closer, so that his head touched his master’s leg as he walked.

But the fear was there. From a spark it grew into a red-hot spot in Jolly Roger’s heart. Twice in his own life he had raced against death in a forest fire. But never had he seen a fire like this must have been. All at once he seemed to hear the roar of it in his ears, the rolling thunder of the earth as it twisted in the cataclysm of flame, the hissing shriek of the flaming pitch-tops as they leapt in lightning fires against the smoke-smothered sky. A few hours ago he had stood where Father John’s Cabin had been and the place was a ruin of char and ash. If the fire had hemmed them in and they had not escaped–

His voice cried out in sudden protest.

“It can’t be, Peter. It can’t be! They made the rail–or the lake –and we’ll find them in the settlements. It couldn’t happen. God wouldn’t let her die like that!”

He stopped, and stared into the moon-broken gloom on his left. Something was there, fifty feet away, that drew him down through the muck which lay knee deep in the right-of-way ditch. It was what was left of the cutter’s cabin, a clutter of burned logs, a wind scattered heap of ash. Even there, within arm’s reach of the railroad, there had been no salvation from the fire.

He waded again through the muck of the ditch, and went on. Mentally and physically he was fighting the ogre that was striving to achieve possession of his brain. Over and over he repeated his faith that Nada and the Missioner had escaped and he would find them in the settlements. Less than ever he thought of the law in these hours. What happened to himself was of small importance now, if he could find Nada alive before the menace caught up with him from behind, or ambushed him ahead. Yet the necessity of caution impinged itself upon him even in the recklessness of his determination to find her if he had to walk into the arms of the law that was hunting him.

For an hour they went on, and as the moon sank westward it seemed to turn its face to look at them; and behind them, when they looked back, the world was transformed into a black pit, while ahead–with the glow of it streaming over their shoulders–ghostly shapes took form, and vision reached farther. Twice they caught the silvery gleam of lakes through the tree-stubs, and again they walked with the rippling murmur of a stream that kept for a mile within the sound of their ears. But even here, with water crying out its invitation to life, there was no life.

Another hour after that Jolly Roger’s pulse beat a little faster as he strained his eyes to see ahead. Somewhere near, within a mile or two, was the first settlement with its sawmill and its bunkhouses, its one store and its few cabins, with flat mountains of sawdust on one side of it, and the evergreen forest creeping up to its doors on the other. Surely they would find life here, where there had been man power to hold fire back from the clearing. And it was here he might find Nada and the Missioner, for more than once Father John had preached to the red-cheeked women and children and the clear-eyed men of the Finnish community that thrived there.

But as they drew nearer he listened in vain for the bark of a dog, and his eyes quested as futilely for a point of light in the wide canopy of gloom. At last, close together, they rounded a curve in the road, and crossed a small bridge with a creek running below, and McKay knew his arm should be able to send a stone to what he was seeking ahead. And then, a minute later, he drew in a great gasping breath of unbelief and horror.

For the settlement was no longer in the clearing between him and the rim-glow of the moon. No living tree raised its head against the sky, no sign of cabin or mill shadowed the earth, and where the store had been, and the little church with its white-painted cross, was only a chaos of empty gloom.

He went down, as he had gone to the tie cutter’s cabin, and for many minutes he stared and listened, while Peter seemed to stand without breathing. Then making a wide megaphone of his hands, he shouted. It was an alarming thing to do and Peter started as if struck. For there were only ghosts to answer back and the hollowness of a shriven pit for the cry to travel in. Nothing was there. Even the great sawdust piles had shrunk into black scars under the scourge of the fire.

A groaning agony was in the breath of Jolly Roger’s lips as he went back to the railroad and hurried on Death must have come here, death sudden and swift. And if it had fallen upon the Finnish settlement, with its strong women and its stronger men, what might it not have done in the cabin of the little old gray Missioner–and Nada?

For a long time after that he forgot Peter was with him. He forgot everything but his desire to reach a living thing. At times, where the road-bed was smooth, he almost ran, and at others he paused for a little to gather his breath and listen. And it was Peter, in one of these intervals, who caught the first message of life. From a long distance away came faintly the barking of a dog.

Half a mile farther on they came to a clearing where no stubs of trees stood up like question marks against the sky, and in this clearing was a cabin, a dark blotch that was without light or sound. But from behind it the dog barked again, and Jolly Roger made quickly toward it. Here there was no ash under his feet, and he knew that at last he had found an oasis of life in the desolation. Loudly he knocked with his fist at the cabin door and soon there was a response inside, the heavy movement of a man’s body getting out of bed, and after that the questioning voice of a woman. He knocked again and the flare of a lighted match illumined the window. Then came the drawing of a bar at the door and a man stood there in his night attire, a man with a heavy face and bristling beard, and a lamp in his hand.

“I beg your pardon for waking you,” said Jolly Roger, “but I am just down from the north, hoping to find my friends back here and I have seen nothing but destruction and death. You are the first living soul I have found to ask about them.”

“Where were they?” grunted the man.

“At Cragg’s Ridge.”

“Then God help them,” came the woman’s voice from back in the room.

“Cragg’s Ridge,” said the man, “was a burning hell in the middle of the night.”

Jolly Roger’s fingers dug into the wood at the edge of the door.

“You mean–“

“A lot of ’em died,” said the man stolidly, as if eager to rid himself of the one who had broken his sleep. “If it was Mooney, he’s dead. An’ if it was Robson, or Jake the Swede, or the Adams family–they’re dead, too.”

“But it wasn’t,” said Jolly Roger, his heart choking between fear and hope. “It was Father John, the Missioner, and Nada Hawkins, who lived with him–or with her foster-mother in the Hawkins’ cabin.”

The man shook his head, and turned down the wick of his lamp.

“I dunno about the girl, or the old witch who was her mother,” he said, “but the Missioner made it out safe, and went to the settlements.”

“And no girl was with him?”

“No, there was no girl,” came the woman’s voice again, and Peter jerked up his ears at the creaking of a bed. “Father John stopped here the second day after the fire had passed, and he said he was gathering up the bones of the dead. Nada Hawkins wasn’t with him, and he didn’t say who had died and who hadn’t. But I think–“

She stopped as the bearded man turned toward her.

“You think what?” demanded Jolly Roger, stepping half into the room.

“I think,” said the woman, “that she died along with the others. Anyway, Jed Hawkins’ witch-woman was burned trying to make for the lake, and little of her was left.”

The man with the lamp made a movement as if to close the door.

“That’s all we know,” he growled.

“For God’s sake–don’t!” entreated Jolly Roger, barring the door with his arm. “Surely there were some who escaped from Cragg’s Ridge and beyond!”

“Mebby a half, mebby less,” said the man. “I tell you it burned like hell, and the worst of it came in the middle of the night with a wind behind it that blew a hurricane. We’ve twenty acres cleared here, with the cabin in the center of it, an’ it singed my beard and burned her hair and scorched our hands, and my pigs died out there from the heat of it. Mebby it’s a place to sleep in for the night you want, stranger?”

“No, I’m going on,” said Jolly Roger, the blood in his veins running with the chill of water. “How far before I come to the end of fire?”

“Ten miles on. It started this side of the next settlement.”

Jolly Roger drew back and the door closed, and standing on the railroad once more he saw the light go out and after that the occasional barking of the settler’s dog grew fainter and fainter behind them.

He felt a great weariness in his bones and body now. With hope struck down the exhaustion of two nights and a day without sleep seized upon him and his feet plodded more and more slowly over the uneven ties of the road. Even in his weariness he fought madly against the thought that Nada was dead and he repeated the word “impossible–impossible” so often that it ran in sing-song through his brain. And he could not keep away from him the white, thin face of the Missioner, who had promised on his faith In God to care for Nada, and who had passed the settler’s cabin ALONE.

Another two hours they went on and then came the first of the green timber. Under the shelter of some balsams Jolly Roger found a resting place and there they waited for the break of dawn. Peter stretched out and slept. But Jolly Roger sat with his head and shoulders against the bole of a tree, and not until the light of the moon was driven away by the darkness that preceded dawn by an hour or two did his eyes close in restless slumber. He was roused by the wakening twitter of birds and in the cold water of a creek that ran near he bathed his face and hands. Peter wondered why there was no fire and no breakfast this morning.

The settlement was only a little way ahead and it was very early when they reached it. People were still in their beds and out of only one chimney was smoke rising into the clear calm of the breaking day. From this cabin a young man came, and stood for a moment after he had closed the door, yawning and stretching his arms and looking up to see what sort of promise the sky held for the day. After that he went to a stable of logs, and Jolly Roger followed him there.

He was unlike the bearded settler, and nodded with a youthful smile of cheer.

“Good morning,” he said. “You’re traveling early, and–“

He looked more keenly as his eyes took in Jolly Roger’s boots and clothes, and the gray pallor in his face.

“Just get in?” he asked kindly. “And–from the burnt country?”

“Yes, from the burnt country. I’ve been away a long time, and I’m trying to find out if my friends are among the living or the dead. Did you ever hear of Father John, the Missioner at Cragg’s Ridge?”

The young man’s face brightened.

“I knew him,” he said. “He helped me to bury my brother, three years ago. And if it’s him you seek, he is safe. He went up to Fort William a week after the fire, and that was in September, eight months past.”

“And was there with him a girl named Nada Hawkins?” asked Jolly Roger, trying hard to speak calmly as he looked into the other’s face.

The youth shook his head.

“No, he was alone. He slept in my cabin overnight, and he said nothing of a girl named Nada Hawkins.”

“Did he speak of others?”

“He was very tired, and I think he was half dead with grief at what had happened. He spoke no names that I remember.”

Then he saw the gray look in Jolly Roger’s face grow deeper, and saw the despair which could not hide itself in his eyes.

“But there were a number of girls who passed here, alone or with their friends,” he said hopefully. “What sort of looking girl was Nada Hawkins?”

“A–kid. That’s what I called her,” said Jolly Roger, in a dead, cold voice. “Eighteen, and beautiful, with blue eyes, and brown hair that she couldn’t keep from blowing in curls about her face. So like an angel you wouldn’t forget her if you’d seen her–just once.”

Gently the youth placed a hand on Jolly Roger’s arm.

“She didn’t come this way,” he said, “but maybe you’ll find her somewhere else. Won’t you have breakfast with me? I’ve a stranger in the cabin, still sleeping, who’s going into the fire country from which you’ve come. He’s hunting for some one, and maybe you can give him information. He’s going to Cragg’s Ridge.”

“Cragg’s Ridge!” exclaimed Jolly Roger. “What is his name?”

“Breault,” said the youth. “Sergeant Breault, of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police.”

Jolly Roger turned to stroke the neck of a horse waiting for its morning feed. But he felt nothing of the touch of flesh under his hand. Cold as iron went his heart, and for half a minute he made no answer. Then he said:

“Thanks, friend. I breakfasted before it was light and I’m hitting out into the brush west and north, for the Rainy River country. Please don’t tell this man Breault that you saw me, for he’ll think badly of me for not waiting to give him information he might want. But–you understand–if you loved the brother who died–that it’s hard for me to talk with anyone just now.”

The young man’s fingers touched his arm again.

“I understand,” he said, “and I hope to God you’ll find her.”

Silently they shook hands, and Jolly Roger hurried away from the cabin with the rising spiral of smoke.

Three days later a man and a dog came from the burned country into the town of Fort William, seeking for a wandering messenger of God who called himself Father John, and a young and beautiful girl whose name was Nada Hawkins. He stopped first at the old mission, in whose shadow the Indians and traders of a century before had bartered their wares, and Father Augustine, the aged patriarch who talked with him, murmured as he went that he was a strange man, and a sick one, with a little madness lurking in his eyes.

And it was, in fact, a madness of despair eating out the life in Jolly Roger’s heart. For he no longer had hope Nada had escaped the fire, even though at no place had he found a conclusive evidence of her death. But that signified little, for there were many of the missing who had not been found between the last of September and these days of May. What he did find, with deadly regularity, was the fact that Father John had escaped–and that he had traveled to safety ALONE.

And Father Augustine told him that when Father John stopped to rest for a few days at the Mission he was heading north, for somewhere on Pashkokogon Lake near the river Albany.

There was little rest for Peter and his master at Fort William town. That Breault must be close on their trail, and following it with the merciless determination of the ferret from which he had been named, there was no shadow of doubt in the mind of Jolly Roger McKay. So after outfitting his pack at a little corner shop, where Breault would be slow to enquire about him, he struck north through the bush toward Dog Lake and the river of the same name. Five or six days, he thought, would bring him to Father John and the truth which he dreaded more and more to hear.

The despondency of his master had sunk, in some mysterious way, into the soul of Peter. Without the understanding of language he sensed the oppressive gloom of tragedy behind and about him and there was a wolfish slinking in the manner of his travel now, and his confidence was going as he caught the disease of despair of the man who traveled with him. But constantly and vigilantly his eyes and scent were questing about them, suspicious of the very winds that whispered in the treetops. And at night after they had built their little cooking fire in the deepest heart of the bush he would lie half awake during the hours of darkness, the watchfulness of his senses never completely dulled in the stupor of sleep.

Since the night they had stopped at the settler’s cabin Jolly Roger’s face had grown grayer and thinner. A number of times he had tried to assure himself what he would do in that moment which was coming when he would stand face to face with Breault the man- hunter. His caution, after he left Fort William, was in a way an automatic instinct that worked for self-preservation in face of the fact that he was growing less and less concerned regarding Breault’s appearance. It was not in his desire to delay the end much longer. The chase had been a long one, with its thrills and its happiness at times, but now he was growing tired and with Nada gone there was only hopeless gloom ahead. If she were dead he wanted to go to her. That thought was a dawning pleasure in his breast, and it was warm in his heart when he tied in a hard knot the buckskin string which locked the flap of his pistol holster. When Breault overtook him the law would know, because of the significance of this knot, that he had welcomed the end of the game.

Never in the northland had there come a spring more beautiful than this of the year in which McKay and his dog went through the deep wilds to Pashkokogon Lake. In a few hours, it seemed, the last chill died out of the air and there came the soft whispers of those bridal-weeks between May and Summer, a month ahead of their time. But Jolly Roger, for the first time in his life, failed to respond to the wonder and beauty of the earth’s rejoicing. The first flowers did not fill him with the old joy. He no longer stood up straight, with expanding chest, to drink in the rare sweetness of air weighted with the tonic of balsams and cedar spruce. Vainly he tried to lift up his soul with the song and bustle of mating things. There was no longer music for him in the flood-time rushing of spring waters. An utter loneliness filled the cry of the loon. And all about him was a vast emptiness from which the spirit of life had fled for him.

Thus he came at last to a stream in the Burntwood country which ran into Pashkokogon Lake; and it was this day, in the mellow sunlight of late afternoon, that they heard coming to them from out of the dense forest the chopping of an axe.

Toward this they made their way, with caution and no sound, until in a little clearing in a bend of the stream they saw a cabin. It was a newly built cabin, and smoke was rising from the chimney.

But the chopping was nearer them, in the heart of a thick cover of evergreen and birch. Into this Jolly Roger and Peter made their way and came within a dozen steps of the man who was wielding the axe. It was then that Jolly Roger rose up with a cry on his lips, for the man was Father John the Missioner.

In spite of the tragedy through which he had passed the little gray man seemed younger than in that month long ago when Jolly Roger had fled to the north. He dropped his axe now and stood as if only half believing, a look of joy shining in his face as he realized the truth of what had happened. “McKay,” he cried, reaching out his hands. “McKay, my boy!”

A look of pity mellowed the gladness in his eyes as he noted the change in Jolly Roger’s face, and the despair that had set its mark upon it.

They stood for a moment with clasped hands, questioning and answering with the silence of their eyes. And then the Missioner said:

“You have heard? Someone has told you?”

“No,” said Jolly Roger, his head dropping a little. “No one has told me,” and he was thinking of Nada, and her death.

Father John’s fingers tightened.

“It is strange how the ways of God bring themselves about,” he spoke in a low voice. “Roger, you did not kill Jed Hawkins!”

Dumbly, his lips dried of words, Jolly Roger stared at him.

“No, you didn’t kill him,” repeated Father John. “On that same night of the storm when you thought you left him dead in the trail, he stumbled back to his cabin, alive. But God’s vengeance came soon.

“A few days later, while drunk, he missed his footing and fell from a ledge to his death. His wife, poor creature, wished him buried in sight of the cabin door–“

But in this moment Roger McKay was thinking less of Breault the Ferret and the loosening of the hangman’s rope from about his neck than he was of another thing. And Father John was saying in a voice that seemed far away and unreal:

“We’ve sent out word to all parts of the north, hoping someone would find you and send you back. And she has prayed each night, and each hour of the day the same prayer has been in her heart and on her lips. And now–“

Someone was coming to them from the direction of the cabin– someone, a girl, and she was singing,

McKay’s face went whiter than the gray ash of fire.

“My God,” he whispered huskily. “I thought–she had died!”

It was only then Father John understood the meaning of what he had seen in his face.

“No, she is alive,” he cried. “I sent her straight north through the bush with an Indian the day after the fire. And later I left word for you with the Fire Relief Committee at Fort Wiliam, where I thought you would first enquire.”

“And it was there,” said Jolly Roger, “that I did not enquire at all!”

In the edge of the clearing, close to the thicket of timber, Nada had stopped. For across the open space a strange looking creature had raced at the sound of her voice; a dog with bristling Airedale whiskers, and a hound’s legs, and wild-wolf’s body hardened and roughened by months of fighting in the wilderness. As in the days of his puppyhood, Peter leapt up against her, and a cry burst from Nada’s lips, a wild and sobbing cry of PETER, PETER, PETER–and it was this cry Jolly Roger heard as he tore away from Father John.

On her knees, with her arms about Peter’s shaggy head, Nada stared wildly at the clump of timber, and in a moment she saw a man break out of it, and stand still, as if the mellow sunlight blinded him, and made him unable to move. And the same choking weakness was at her own heart as she rose up from Peter, and reached out her arms toward the gray figure in the edge of the wood, sobbing, trying to speak and yet saying no word.

And a little slower, because of his age, Father John came a moment later, and peered out with the knowledge of long years from a thicket of young banksians, and when he saw the two in the open, close in each other’s arms, and Peter hopping madly about them, he drew out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes, and went back then for the axe which he had dropped in the timber clump.

There was a great drumming in Jolly Roger’s head, and for a time he failed even to hear Peter yelping at their side, for all the world was drowned in those moments by the breaking sobs in Nada’s breath and the wild thrill of her body in his arms; and he saw nothing but the upturned face, crushed close against his breast, and the wide-open eyes, and the lips to kiss. And even Nada’s face he seemed to see through a silvery mist, and he felt her arms strangely about his neck, as if it was all half like a dream–a dream of the kind that had come to him beside his campfire. It was a little cry from Nada that drove the unreality away.

“Roger–you’re–breaking me,” she cried, gasping for her breath in his arms, yet without giving up the clasp of her own arms about his neck in the least; and at that he sensed the brutality of his strength, and held her off a little, looking into her face.

Pride and happiness and the courage in his heart would have slunk away could he have seen himself then, as Father John saw him, coming from the edge of the bush, and as Nada saw him, held there at the end of his arms. Since the day he had come with Peter to Cragg’s Ridge the blade of a razor had not touched his face, and his beard was like a brush, and with it his hair unkempt and straggling; and his eyes were red from sleeplessness and the haunting of that grim despair which had dogged his footsteps.

But these things Nada did not see. Or, if she did, there must have been something beautiful about them for her. For it was not a little girl, but a woman who was standing there before Jolly Roger now–Nada grown older, very much older it seemed to McKay, and taller, with her hair no longer rioting free about her, but gathered up in a wonderful way on the crown of her head. This change McKay discovered as she stood there, and it swept upon him all in a moment, and with it the prick of something swift and terrorizing inside him. She was not the little girl of Cragg’s Ridge. She was a WOMAN. In a year had come this miracle of change, and it frightened him, for such a creature as this that stood before him now Jed Hawkins would never have dared to curse or beat, and he–Roger McKay–was afraid to gather her back into his arms again.

And then, even as his fingers slowly drew themselves away from her shoulders, he saw that which had not changed–the wonder-light in her eyes, the soul that lay as open to him now as on that other day in Indian Tom’s cabin, when Mrs. Captain Kidd had bustled and squeaked on the pantry shelf, and Peter had watched them as he lay with his broken leg in the going down of the sun. And as he hesitated it was Nada herself who came into his arms, and laid her head on his breast, and trembled and laughed and cried there, while Father John came up and patted her shoulder, and smiled happily at McKay, and then went on to the cabin in the clearing. For a time after that Jolly Roger crushed his face in Nada’s hair, and neither said a word, but there was a strange throbbing of their hearts together, and after a little Nada reached up a hand to his cheek, and stroked it tenderly, bristly beard and all.

“I’ll never let you run away from me again–Mister–Jolly Roger,” she said, and it was the little Nada of Cragg’s Ridge who whispered the words, half sobbing; but in the voice there was also something very definite and very sure, and McKay felt the glorious thrill of it as he raised his face from her hair, and saw once more the sun-filled world about him.

CHAPTER XVIII

Following this day Peter was observant of a strange excitement in the cabin on the Burntwood. It was not so much a thing of physical happening, but more the mysterious FEEL of something impending and very near. The day following their arrival in the Pashkokogon country his master seemed to have forgotten him entirely. It was Nada who noticed him, but even she was different; and Father John went about, overseeing two Indians whom he kept very busy, his pale, thin face luminous with an anticipation which roused Peter’s curiosity, and kept him watchful. He was puzzled, too, by the odd actions of the humans about him. The second morning Nada remained in her room, and Jolly Roger wandered off into the woods without his breakfast, and Father John ate alone, smiling gently as he looked at the tightly closed door of Nada’s bedroom. Even Oosimisk, the Leaf Bud, the sleek-haired Indian woman who cared for the house, was nervously expectant as she watched for Nada, and Mistoos, her husband, grunted and grimaced as he carried in from the edge of the forest many loads of soft evergreens on his shoulders.

Into the forest Jolly Roger went alone, puffing furiously at his pipe. He was all a-tremble and his blood seemed to quiver and dance as it ran through his veins. Since the first rose-flush of dawn he had been awake, fighting against this upsetting of every nerve that was in him.

He felt pitiably weak and helpless. But it was the weakness and helplessness of a happiness too vast for him to measure. It was Nada in her ragged shoes and dress, with the haunting torture of Jed Hawkins’ brutality in her eyes and face, that he had expected to find, if he found her at all; someone to fight for, and kill for if necessary, someone his muscle and brawn would always protect against evil. He had not dreamed that in these many months with Father John she would change from “a little kid goin’ on eighteen” into–A WOMAN.

He tried to recall just what he had said to her last night–that he was still an outlaw, and would always be, no matter how well he lived from this day on; and that she, now that she had Father John’s protection, was very foolish to care for him, or keep her troth with him, and would be happier if she could forget what had happened at Cragg’s Ridge.

“You’re a WOMAN now,” he said. “A WOMAN–” he had emphasized that –“and you don’t need me any more.”

And she had looked at him, without speaking, as if reading what was inside him; and then, with a sudden little laugh, she swiftly pulled her hair down about her shoulders, and repeated the very words she had said to him a long time ago–“Without you–I’d want to die–Mister–Jolly Roger,” and with that she turned and ran into the cabin, her hair flying riotously, and he had not seen her again since that moment.

Since then his heart had behaved like a thing with the fever, and it was beating swiftly now as he looked at his watch and noted the quick passing of time.

Back in the cabin Peter was sniffing at the crack under Nada’s door, and listening to her movement. For a long time he had heard her, but not once had she opened the door. And he wondered, after that, why Oosimisk and her husband and Father John piled evergreens all about, until the cabin looked like the little jackpine trysting-place down at Cragg’s Ridge, even to the soft carpet of grass on the floor, and flowers scattered all about.

Hopeless of understanding what it meant, he went outside, and waited in the warm May-day sun until his master came back through the clearing. What happened after that puzzled him greatly. When he followed Jolly Roger into the cabin Mistoos and the Leaf Bud were seated in chairs, their hands folded, and Father John stood behind a small table on which lay an open book, and he was looking at his watch when they came in. He nodded, and smiled, and very clearly Peter saw his master gulp, as if swallowing something that was in his throat. And the ruddiness had gone completely out of his smooth-shaven cheeks. It was the first time Peter had seen his master so clearly afraid, and from his burrow in the evergreens he growled under his breath, eyeing the open door with sudden thought of an enemy.

And then Father John was tapping at Nada’s door.

He went back to the table and waited, and as the knob of the door turned very slowly Jolly Roger swallowed again, and took a step toward it. It opened, and Nada stood there. And Jolly Roger gave a little cry, so low that Peter could just hear it, as he held out his hands to her.

For Nada was no longer the Nada who had come to him in Father John’s clearing. She was the Nada of Cragg’s Ridge, the Nada of that wild night of storm when he had fled into the north. Her hair fell about her, as in the old days when Peter and she had played together among the rocks and flowers, and her wedding dress was faded and torn, for it was the dress she had worn that night of despair when she sent her message to Peter’s master, and on her little feet were shoes broken and disfigured by her flight in those last hours of her mighty effort to go with the man she loved. In Father John’s eyes, as she stood there, was a great astonishment; but in Jolly Roger’s there came such a joy that, in answer to it, Nada went straight into his arms and held up her lips to be kissed.

Her cheeks were very pink when she stood beside McKay, with Father John before them, the open book in his hands; and then, as her long lashes drooped over her eyes, and her breath came a little more quickly, she saw Peter staring at her questioningly, and made a little motion to him with her hand. He went to her, and her fingers touched his head as Father John began speaking. Peter looked up, and listened, and was very quiet in these moments. Jolly Roger was staring straight at the balsam-decked wall opposite him, but there was something mighty strong and proud in the way he held his head, and the fear had gone completely out of his eyes. And Nada stood very close to him, so that her brown head lightly touched his shoulder and he could see the silken shimmer of loose tresses which with sweet intent she had let fall over his arm. And her little fingers clung tightly to his thumb, as on that blessed night when they had walked together across the plain below Cragg’s Ridge, with the moon lighting their way.

Peter, in his dog way, fell a-wondering as he stood there, but kept his manners and remained still. When it was all over he felt a desire to show his teeth and growl, for when Father John had kissed Nada, and was shaking Jolly Roger’s hand, he saw his mistress crying in that strange, silent way he had so often seen her crying in his puppyhood days. Only now her blue eyes were wide open as she looked at Jolly Roger, and her cheeks were flushed to the pink of wild rose petals, and her lips were trembling a little, and there was a tiny something pulsing in her soft white throat. And all at once there came a smile with the tears, and Jolly Roger–turning from Father John to find her thus–gathered her close in his arms, and Peter wagged his tail and went out into the sun-filled day, where he heard a red squirrel challenging him from a stub in the edge of the clearing.

A little later he saw Nada and his master come out of the cabin, and walk hand in hand across the open into the sweet-smelling timber where Father John had been chopping with his axe.

On a fresh-cut log Nada sat down, and McKay sat beside her, still holding her hand. Not once had he spoken in crossing the open, and it seemed as though little devils were holding his lips closed now.

With her eyes looking down at the greening earth under their feet, Nada said, very softly,

“Mister–Jolly Roger–are you glad?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Glad that I am–your wife?”

The word drew a great, sobbing breath from him, and looking up suddenly she saw that he was staring over the balsam-tops into the wonderful blue of the sky.

“Your WIFE,” she whispered, touching his shoulder gently with her lips.

“Yes, I’m glad,” he said. “So glad that I’m–afraid.”

“Then–if you are glad–please kiss me again.”

He stood up, and drew her to him, and held her face between his hands as he kissed her red lips; and after that he kissed her shining hair again and again, and when he let her go her eyes were a glory of happiness.

“And you will never run away from me again?” she demanded, holding him at arm’s length. “Never?”

“Never!”

“Then–I want nothing more in this life,” she said, nestling against him again. “Only you, for ever and ever.”

Jolly Roger made no answer, but held her a long time in his arms, with the soft beating of her heart against him, and listened to the twitter and song of nesting and mating things about them. In this silence she lay content, until Peter–growing restless– started quietly into the golden depths of the forest.

It was Pied-Bot’s going, cautious and soft-footed, as if danger and menace might lurk just ahead of him, that brought another look into McKay’s eyes as Nada’s hand crept to his cheek, and rested there.

“You love me–very much?”

“More than life,” he answered, and as he spoke he was watching Peter, questing the soft wind that came whispering from the south.

Her finger touched his lips, gentle and sweet.

“And wherever you go, I go–forever and always?” she questioned.

“Yes, forever and always”–and his eyes were looking through miles upon miles of deep forest, and at the end he saw the thin and pitiless face of a man who was following his trail, Breault the Ferret.

His arms closed more tightly about her, and he pressed her face against him.

“And I pray God you will never be sorry,” he said, still looking through the miles of forest.

“No, no–sorry I shall never be,” she cried softly. “Not if we fly, and go hungry, and fight–and die. Never shall I be sorry– with you,” and he felt the tightening of her arms.

And then, as he remained silent, with his lips on the velvety smoothness of her hair, she told him what Father John had already told him–of her wild effort to overtake him in that night of storm when he had fled from the Missioner’s cabin at Cragg’s Ridge; and in turn he told her how Peter came to him in the break of the morning with the treasure which had saved him heart and soul, and how he had given that treasure into the keeping of Yellow Bird, on the shores of Wollaston.

And thereafter, for an hour, as they wandered through the May-time sweetness of the forest, she would permit him to talk of only Yellow Bird and Sun Cloud; and, one thing leading to another, she learned how it was that Yellow Bird had been his fairy in childhood days, and how he came to be an outlaw for her in later manhood. Her eyes were shining when he had finished, and her red lips were a-tremble with the quickness of her breathing.

“Some day–you’ll take me there,” she whispered. “Oh, I’m so proud of you, my Roger. And I love Yellow Bird. And Sun Cloud. Some day –we’ll go!”

He nodded, happiness overshadowing the fear of Breault that had grown in his heart.

“Yes, we’ll go. I’ve dreamed it, and the dream helped to keep me alive–“

And then he told her of Cassidy, and of the paradise he had found with Giselle and her grandfather on the other side of Wollaston.

And so it happened the hours passed swiftly, and it was afternoon when they returned to Father John’s cabin, and Nada went into her room.

In the early waning of the sun the feast which the Leaf Bud had been preparing was ready, and not until then did Nada appear again.

And once more the lump rose up in Roger’s throat at the wonder of her, for very completely she had transformed herself into a woman again, from the softly shining coils of hair on the crown of her head to the coquettish little slippers that set off her dainty feet. And he saw the white gleam of soft shoulders and tender arms where once had been rags and bruises, and held there by the slim beauty and exquisite daintiness of her he stared like a fool, until suddenly she laughed joyously at his amaze, and ran to him with wide-open arms, and kissed him so soundly that Peter cocked up his ears a bit startled. And then she kissed Father John, and after that was mistress at the table, radiant in her triumph and her eyes starry with happiness.

And she was no longer shy in speaking his name, but called him Roger boldly and many times, and twice during that meal of marvelous forgetfulness–though long lashes covered her eyes when she spoke it–she called him ‘my husband.’

In truth she was a woman and for the most part Roger McKay– fighting man and very strong though he was–looked at her in dumb worship, speaking little, his heart a-throb, and his brain reeling in the marvel of what at last had come into his possession.

And yet, even in this hour of supreme happiness that held him half mute, there was always lurking in the back of his brain a thought of Breault, the Ferret.

CHAPTER XIX

In the star dusk of evening the time came when he spoke his fears to Father John.

Nada had gone into her room, taking Peter with her, and out under the cool of the skies Father John’s pale face was turned up to the unending glory of the firmament, and his lips were whispering a prayer of gratitude and blessing, when Roger laid a hand gently on his arm.

“Father,” he said, “it is a wonderful night.”

“A night of gladness and omen,” replied Father John. “See the stars! They seem to be alive and rejoicing, and it is not sacrilege to believe they are, giving you their benediction.”

“And yet–I am afraid.”

“Afraid?”

Father John looked into his eyes, and saw him staring off over the forest-tops.

“Yes–afraid for her.”

Briefly he told him of what had happened on the Barren months ago, and how he had narrowly escaped Breault in coming away from the burned country.

“He is on my trail,” he said, “and tonight he is not very far away.”

The Missioner’s hand rested in a comforting way on his arm.

“You did not kill Jed Hawkins, my son, and for that we have thanked God each day and night of our lives–Nada and I. And each evening she has prayed for you, kneeling at my side, and through every hour of the day I know she was praying for you in her heart –and I believe in the answer to prayer such as that, Roger. Her faith, now, is as deep as the sea. And you, too, must have faith.”

“She is more precious to me than life–a thousand lives, if I had them,” whispered Jolly Roger. “If anything should happen–now–“

“Yes, if the thing you fear should happen, what then?” cried Father John, faith ringing like a note of inspiration in his low voice. “What, then, Roger? You did not kill Jed Hawkins. If the law compels you to pay a price for the errors it believes you have committed, will that price be so terribly severe?”

“Prison, Father. Probably five years.”

Father John laughed softly, the star-glow revealing a radiance in his face.

“Five years!” he repeated. “Oh, my boy, my dear boy, what are five years to pay for such a treasure as that which has come into your possession tonight? Five short years–only five. And she waiting for you, proud of you for those very achievements which sent you to prison, planning for all the future that lies beyond those five short years, growing sweeter and more beautiful for you as she waits–Roger, is that a very great sacrifice? Is it too great a price to pay? Five years, and after that–peace, love, happiness for all time? Is it, Roger?”

McKay felt his voice tremble as he tried to answer.

“But she, father–“

“Yes, yes, I know what you would say,” interrupted Father John gently. “I argued with her, just as you would have argued, Roger. I appealed to her reason. I told her that if you returned it would mean prison for you, and strangely I said that same thing–five years. But I found her selfish, Roger, very selfish–and set upon her desire beyond all reason. And it was she who asked first those very questions I have asked you tonight. ‘What are five years?’ she demanded of me, defying my logic. ‘What are five years–or ten–or twenty, IF I KNOW I AM TO HAVE HIM AFTER THAT?’ Yes, she was selfish, Roger. Just that great is her love for you.”

“Dear God in Heaven,” breathed Jolly Roger, and stopped, his eyes staring wide at the stars.

“And after that, after I had given in to her selfishness, Roger,