Peter trembled at the sobbing, but his heart and his desire were with the man who had gone.  In his unreasoning little soul it was Jed Hawkins who was rattling the windows with his unseen hands and who was pounding at the door with the wind, and who was filling the black night with its menace and fear.  He hated this man, who lay back in the trail with his lifeless face turned up to the deluge that poured out of the sky.  And he was afraid of the man, even as he hated him, and he believed that Nada was afraid of him, and that because of her fear she was crying there in the middle of the floor, with Father John patting her shoulder and stroking her hair, and saying things to her which he could not understand.  He wanted to go to her.  He wanted to feel himself close against her, as Nada had held him so often in those hours when she had unburdened her grief and her unhappiness to him.  But even stronger than this desire was the one to follow his master.

He went to the door, and thrust his nose against the crack at the bottom of it.  He felt the fierceness of the wind fighting to break in, and the broken mist of it filled his nostrils.  But there came no scent of Jolly Roger McKay.  For a moment he struggled at the crack with his paws.  Then he flopped himself down, his heart beating fast, and fixed his eyes inquiringly on Nada and the Missioner.

His four and a half months of life in the big wilderness, and his weeks of constant comradeship with Jolly Roger, had developed in him a brain that was older than his body.  No process of reasoning could impinge upon him the fact that his master was an outlaw, but with the swift experiences of tragedy and hiding and never-ceasing caution had come instinctive processes which told him almost as much as reason.  He knew something was wrong tonight.  It was in the air.  He breathed it.  It thrilled in the crash of thunder, in the lightning fire, in the mighty hands of the wind rocking the cabin and straining at the windows.  And vaguely the knowledge gripped him that the dead man back in the trail was responsible for it all, and that because of this something that had happened his mistress was crying and his master was gone.  And he believed he should also have gone with Jolly Roger into the blackness and mystery of the storm, to fight with him against the one creature in all the world he hated—­the dead man who lay back in the thickness of gloom between the forest walls.

And the Missioner was saying to Nada, in a quiet, calm voice out of which the tragedies of years had burned all excitement and passion: 

“God will forgive him, my child.  In His mercy He will forgive Roger McKay, because he killed Jed Hawkins to save you.  But man will not forgive.  The law has been hunting him because he is an outlaw, and to outlawry he has added what the law will call murder.  But God will not look at it in that way.  He will look into the heart of the man, the man who sacrificed himself—­”