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.