“You little devil!” he exulted.  “You nervy little devil!”

He raised the papers higher, and again looked upon his discovery of half an hour ago.  In a soft nest lay four tiny mice, still naked and blind, and as he lowered the mass of papers the mother burrowed back to them, and he could hear her squeaking and chirruping to the little ones, as if she was trying to tell them not to be afraid of this man, for she knew him very well, and it wasn’t in his mind to hurt them.  And Jolly Roger, as he returned to the setting of his table, laughed again—­and the laugh rolled out into the golden sunset, and from the top of a spruce at the edge of the creek a big blue-jay answered it in a riotous challenge.

But at the bottom of that laugh, if one could have looked a bit deeper, was something more than the naked little mice in the nest of torn-up paper.  Today happiness had strangely come this gay-hearted freebooter’s way, and he might have reached out, and seized it, and have kept it for his own.  But in the hour of his opportunity he had refused it—­because he was an outlaw—­because strong within him was a peculiar code of honor all his own.  There was nothing of man-made religion in the soul of Roger McKay.  Nature was his god; its manifestations, its life, and the air it gave him to breathe were the pages which made up the Book that guided him.  And within the last hour, since the sun had begun to drop behind the tips of the tallest trees, these things had told him that he was a fool for turning away from the one great thing in all life—­simply because his own humors of existence had made him an outcast and hunted by the laws of men.  So the change had come, and for a space his soul was filled with the thrill of song and laughter.

Half an hour ago he believed that he had definitely made up his mind.  He had forced himself into forgetfulness of laws he had broken, and the scarlet-coated men who were ever on the watch for his trail.  They would never seek him here, in the wilderness country close to the edge of civilization, and time, he had told himself in that moment of optimism, would blot out both his identity and his danger.  Tomorrow he would go over to Cragg’s Ridge again, and then—­

His mind was crowded with a vision of blue eyes, of brown curls glowing in the pale sun, of a wistful, wide-eyed little face turned up to him, and red lips that said falteringly, “I don’t think it’s wrong for you to kiss me—­if you want to, Mister Jolly Roger!”

Boldly he had talked about it to the bright-eyed little mother-mouse who peered at him now and then over the edge of her box.

“You’re a little devil of iniquity yourself,” he told her.  “You’re a regular Mrs. Captain Kidd, and you’ve eaten my cheese, and chawed my snowshoe laces, and robbed me of a sock to make your nest.  I ought to catch you in a trap, or blow your head off.  But I don’t.  I let you live—­and have a fam’ly.  And it’s you who have given me the Big Idea, Mrs. Captain Kidd.  You sure have!  You’ve told me I’ve got a right to have a nest of my own, and I’m going to have it—­an’ in that nest is going to be the sweetest, prettiest little angel that God Almighty ever forgot to make into a flower!  Yessir.  And if the law comes—­”