Whether he would have used the gun had the red-coated police suddenly appeared, McKay had not quite assured himself.  Day after day the same old fight went on within him.  He analyzed his situation from every point of view, and always—­no matter how he went about it—­eventually found himself face to face with the same definite fact.  If the law succeeded in catching Him it would not trouble itself to punish him for stealing back the Treaty Money, or for holding up Government mails, or for any of his other misdemeanors.  It would hang him for the murder of Jed Hawkins.  And the minions of the law would laugh at the truth, even if he told it—­which he never would.  More than once his imaginative genius had drawn up a picture of that impossible happening.  For it was a truth so inconceivable that he found the absurdity of it a grimly humorous thing.  Even Nada believed he had killed her scoundrelly foster-father.  Yet it was she—­herself—­who had killed him!  And it was Nada whom the law would hang, if the truth was known—­and believed.

Frequently he went back over the scenes of that tragic night at Cragg’s Ridge when all the happiness in the world seemed to be offering itself to him—­the night when Nada was to go with him to the Missioner’s, to become his wife, And then—­the dark trail—­ the disheveled girl staggering to him through the starlight, and her sobbing story of how Jed Hawkins had tried to drag her through the forest to Mooney’s cabin, and how—­at last—­she had saved herself by striking him down with a stick which she had caught up out of the darkness.  Would the police believe him—­an outlaw—­if he told the rest of the story?—­how he had gone back to give Jed Hawkins the beating of his life, and had found him dead in the trail, where Nada had struck him down?  Would they believe him if, in a moment of cowardice, he told them that to protect the girl he loved he had fastened the responsibility of the crime upon himself?  No, they would not.  He had made the evidence too complete.  The world would call him a lying yellow-back if he betrayed what had actually happened on the trail between Cragg’s Ridge and Mooney’s cabin.

And this, after all, was the one remaining bit of happiness in Jolly Roger’s heart, the knowledge that he had made the evidence utterly complete, and that Nada would never know, and the world would never know—­the truth.  His love for the blue-eyed girl-woman who had given her heart and her soul into his keeping, even when she knew he was an outlaw, was an undying thing, like his love for the mother of years ago.  “It will be easy to die for her,” he told Peter, and this, in the end, was what he knew he was going to do.  Thought of the inevitable did not make him afraid.  He was determined to keep his freedom and his life as long as he could, but he was fatalistic enough, and sufficiently acquainted with the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, to know what the ultimate of the thing would be.  And yet,