with tragedy behind him, and a still grimmer tragedy ahead, the soul of Jolly Roger was not dead or in utter darkness.  In it, waking and sleeping, he enshrined the girl who had been willing to give up all other things in the world for him, who had pleaded with him in the last hour of storm down on the edge of civilization that she be given the privilege of accompanying him wherever his fate might lead.  That he was an outlaw had not destroyed her faith in him.  That he had killed a man—­a man unfit to live—­had only drawn her arms more closely about him, and had made her more completely a part of him.  And a thousand times the maddening thought possessed Jolly Roger—­was he wrong, and not right, in refusing to accept the love and companionship which she had begged him to accept, in spite of all that had happened and all that might happen?

Day by day he slowly won for himself, and at last, as they traveled in the direction of Yellow Bird’s country, he crushed the final doubt that oppressed him, and knew that he was right.  In his selfishness he had not shackled her to an outlaw.  He had left her free.  Life and hope and other happiness were ahead of her.  He had not destroyed her, and this thought would strengthen him and leave something of gladness in his heart, even in that gray dawn when the law would compel him to make his final sacrifice.

It is a strange peace which follows grief, a secret happiness no other soul but one can understand.  Out of it excitement and passion have been burned, and it is then the Great God of things comes more closely into the possession of his own.  And now, as they went westward and north toward the Wollaston Lake country, this peace possessed Jolly Roger.  It mellowed his world.  It was half an ache, half a steady and undying pain, but it drew Life nearer to him than he had ever known it before.  His love for the sun and the sky, for the trees and flowers and all growing things of the earth was more worship of the divine than a love for physical things, and each day he felt it drawing more closely about him in its comradeship, whispering to him of its might, and of its power to care for him in the darkest hours of stress that might come.

He did not travel fast after he had reached the decision to go to Yellow Bird’s people.  And he tried to imagine, a great deal of the time, that Nada was with him.  He succeeded in a way that bewildered Peter, for quite frequently the man talked to someone who was not there.

The slowness and caution with which they traveled developed Peter’s mental faculties with marvelous swiftness.  His master, free of egoism and prejudice, had placed him on a plane of intimate equality, and Peter struggled each day to live up a little more to the responsibility of this intimacy and confidence.  Instinct, together with human training, taught him woodcraft until in many ways he was more clever than his master.  And along with this Jolly Roger slowly but surely impressed upon him the difference between wanton slaughter and necessary killing.