“Goodby, Cassidy!”

With it mingled the defiant bark of a dog.

In her tepee, a moment later, Yellow Bird drew Sun Cloud’s glossy head close against her warm breast, and turned her radiant face up thankfully to the smoke hole in the tepee top, through which the spirits had whispered their warning to her.  Indistinctly, and still farther away, her straining ears heard again the cry,

“Goodby, Cassidy!”

CHAPTER XII

In Cassidy’s canoe, driving himself with steady strokes deeper into the mystery of the starlit waters of Wollaston, Jolly Roger felt the night suddenly filled with an exhilarating tonic.  Its deadness was gone.  Its weight had lifted.  A ripple broke the star gleams where an increasing breeze touched the surface of the lake.  And the thrill of adventure stirred in his blood.  He laughed as he put his skill and strength in the sweep of his paddle, and for a time the thought that he was an outlaw, and in losing Nada had lost everything in life worth righting for, was not so oppressive.  It was the old, joyous laugh, stirred by his sense of humor, and the trick he had played on Cassidy.  He could imagine Cassidy back on the shore, his temper redder than his hair as he cursed and tore up the sand in his search for another canoe.

“We’re inseparable,” Jolly Roger explained to Peter.  “Wherever I go, Cassidy is sure to follow.  You see, it’s this way.  A long time ago someone gave Cassidy what they call an assignment, and in that assignment it says ’go get Jolly Roger McKay, dead or alive’—­or something to that effect.  And Cassidy has been on the job ever since.  But he can’t quite catch up with me, Pied-Bot.  I’m always a little ahead.”

And yet, even as he laughed, there was in Jolly Roger’s heart a yearning to which he had never given voice.  Half a dozen times he might have killed Cassidy, and an equal number of times Cassidy might have killed him.  But neither had taken advantage of the opportunity to destroy.  They had played the long and thrilling game like men, and because of the fairness and sportsmanship of the man who hunted him Jolly Roger thought of Cassidy as he might have thought of a brother, and more than once he yearned to go to him, and hold out his hand in friendship.  Yet he knew Corporal Cassidy was the deadliest menace the earth held for him, a menace that had followed him like a shadow through months and years—­ across the Barren Lands, along the rim of the Arctic, down the Mackenzie, and back again—­a menace that never tired, and was never far behind in that ten thousand miles of wilderness they had covered.  Together in the bloodstirring game of One against One they had faced the deadliest perils of the northland.  They had gone hungry, and cold, and more than once a thousand miles of nothingness lay behind them, and death seemed preferable to anything that might lie ahead.  Yet in that aloneness, when companionship was more precious than anything else on earth, neither had cried quits.  The game had gone on, Cassidy after his man—­and Jolly Roger McKay fighting for his freedom.