Rocks grew thicker and heavier under their feet, and they went more slowly, and occasionally stumbled in the gloom.  But, after a fashion, they knew their way even in darkness.  More than once Peter had wondered why his master had so carefully explored this useless mass of upheaved rock at the end of Cragg’s Ridge.  They had never seen an animal or a blade of grass in all its gray, sun-blasted sterility.  It was like a hostile thing, overhung with a half-dead, slow-beating something that was like the dying pulse of an evil thing.  And now darkness added to its mystery and its unfriendliness as Peter nosed close at his master’s heels.  Up and up they picked their way, over and between ragged upheavals of rock, twisting into this broken path and that, feeling their way, partly sensing it, and always ascending toward the stars.  Roger McKay did not speak again to Peter.  Each time he came out where the sky was clear he looked toward the solitary dark pinnacle, far up and ahead, strangely resembling a giant tombstone in the star-glow, that was their guide.  And after many minutes of strange climbing, in which it seemed to Jolly Roger the nail-heads in the soles of his boots made weirdly loud noises on the rocks, they came near to the top.

There they stopped, and in a deeply shadowed place where there was a carpet of soft sand, with walls of rock close on either side, Jolly Roger spread out his blankets.  Then he went out from the black shadow, so that a million stars seemed not far away over their heads.  Here he sat down, and began to smoke, thinking of what tomorrow would hold for him, and of the many days destined to follow that tomorrow.  Nowhere in the world was there to be—­for him—­the peace of an absolute certainty.  Not until he felt the cold steel of iron bars with his two hands, and the fatal game had been played to the end.

There was no corrosive bitterness of the vengeful in Jolly Roger’s heart.  For that reason even his enemies, the Police, had fallen into the habit of using the nickname which the wilderness people had given him.  He did not hate these police.  Curiously, he loved them.  Their type was to him the living flesh and blood of the finest manhood since the Crusaders.  And he did not hate the law.  At times the Law, as personified in all of its unswerving majesty, amused him.  It was so terribly serious over such trivial things—­ like himself, for instance.  It could not seem to sleep or rest until a man was hanged, or snugly put behind hard steel, no matter how well that man loved his human-kind—­and the world.  And Jolly Roger loved both.  In his heart he believed he had not committed a crime by achieving justice where otherwise there would have been no justice.  Yet outwardly he cursed himself for a lawbreaker.  And he loved life.  He loved the stars silently glowing down at him tonight.  He loved even the gray, lifeless rock, which recalled to his imaginative genius the terrific and interesting life that had once existed—­he loved the ghostly majesty of the grave-like pinnacle that rose above him, and beyond that he loved all the world.