She drew a deep breath, and looked out over the rocks to the valley and the black forest beyond.  And her fingers, under Peter’s scrawny armpits, tightened until he grunted.

“And he asked me if he could touch my hair—­mind you he asked me that, Peter!—­And when I said ‘yes’ he just put his hand on it, as if he was afraid, and he said it was beautiful, and that I must take wonderful care of it!”

Peter saw a throbbing in her throat.

“Peter—­he said he didn’t want to do anything wrong to me, that he’d cut off his hand first.  He said that!  And then he said—­if I didn’t think it was wrong—­he’d like to kiss me—­”

She hugged Peter up close to her again.

“And—­I told him I guessed it wasn’t wrong, because I liked him, and nobody else had ever kissed me, and—­Peter—­he didn’t kiss me!  And when he went away he looked so queer—­so white-like—­and somethin’ inside me has been singing ever since.  I don’t know what it is, Peter.  But it’s there!”

And then, after a moment.

“Peter,” she whispered, “I wish Mister Jolly Roger would take us away!”

The thought drew a tightening to her lips, and the pucker of a frown between her eyes, and she sat Peter down beside her and looked over the valley to the black forest, in the heart of which was Jolly Roger’s cabin.

“It’s funny he don’t want anybody to know he’s there, ain’t it—­I mean—­isn’t it, Peter?” she mused.  “He’s livin’ in the old shack Indian Tom died in last winter, and I’ve promised not to tell.  He says it’s a great secret, and that only you, and I, and the Missioner over at Sucker Creek know anything about it.  I’d like to go over and clean up the shack for him.  I sure would.”

Peter, beginning to nose among the rocks, did not see the flash of fire that came slowly into the blue of the girl’s eyes.  She was looking at her ragged shoes, at the patched stockings, at the poverty of her faded dress, and her fingers clenched in her lap.

“I’d do it—­I’d go away—­somewhere—­and never come back, if it wasn’t for her,” she breathed.  “She treats me like a witch most of the time, but Jed Hawkins made her that way.  I kin remember—­”

Suddenly she jumped up, and flung back her head defiantly, so that her hair streamed out in a sun-filled cloud in a gust of wind that came up the valley.

“Some day, I’ll kill ’im,” she cried to the black forest across the plain.  “Some day—­I will!”

CHAPTER II

She followed Peter.  For a long time the storm had been gathering in her brain, a storm which she had held back, smothered under her unhappiness, so that only Peter had seen the lightning-flashes of it.  But today the betrayal had forced itself from her lips, and in a hard little voice she had told Jolly Roger—­the stranger who had come into the black forest—­how her mother and father had died of the same plague more than ten years ago,