And there he stood, the heat of his rage changing to an icy chill, his heart dragging within him like a chunk of lead, his breath choking in his throat.  Jed Hawkins was dead!  He was growing stiff there in the black trail.  He had ceased to breathe.  He had ceased to be a part of life.  And the wind, rising a little with the coming of storm, seemed to whisper and chortle over the horrible thing, and the lone wolf in Indian Tom’s swamp howled weirdly, as if he smelled death.

Jolly Roger McKay’s finger-nails dug into the flesh of his palms.  If he had killed the human viper at his feet, if his own hands had meted out his punishment, he would not have felt the clammy terror that wrapped itself about him in the darkness.  But he had come too late.  It was Nada who had killed Jed Hawkins.  Nada, with her woman’s soul just born in all its glory, had taken the life of her foster-father.  And Canadian law knew no excuse for killing.

The chill crept to his finger-tips, and unconsciously, in a childish sort of way, he sobbed between his clenched teeth.  The thunder was rolling nearer, and it was like a threatening voice, a deep-toned booming of a thing inevitable and terrible.  He felt the air shivering about him, and suddenly something moved softly against his foot, and he heard a questioning whine.  It was Peter—­ come back to him in this hour when he needed a living thing to give him courage.  With a groan he dropped on his knees again, and clutched his hands about Peter.

“My God,” he breathed huskily.  “Peter, she’s killed him.  And she mustn’t know.  We mustn’t let anyone know—­”

And there he stopped, and Peter felt him growing rigid as stone, and for many moments Jolly Roger’s body seemed as lifeless as that of the man who lay with up-turned face in the trail.  Then he fumbled in a pocket and found a pencil and an old envelope.  And on the envelope, with the darkness so thick he could not see his hand, he scribbled, “I killed Jed Hawkins,” and after that he signed his name firmly and fully—­“Jolly Roger McKay.”

Then he tucked the envelope under Jed Hawkins’ body, where the rain could not get at it.  And after that, to make the evidence complete, he covered the dead man’s face with his coat.

“We’ve got to do it, Peter,” he said, and there was a new note in his voice as he stood up on his feet again.  “We’ve got to do it—­ for her.  We’ll—­tell her we caught Jed Hawkins in the trail and killed him.”

Caution, cleverness, his old mental skill returned to him.  He dragged the boot-legger’s body to a new spot, turned it face down, threw the club away, and kicked up the earth with his boots to give signs of a struggle.

The note in his voice was triumph—­triumph in spite of its heartbreak—­as he turned back over the trail after he had finished, and spoke to Peter.

“We may have done some things we oughtn’t to, Pied-Bot,” he said, “but tonight I sort o’ think we’ve tried to make—­restitution.  And if they hang us, which they probably will some time, I sort o’ think it’ll make us happy to know we’ve done it—­for her.  Eh, Pied-Bot?”