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!”