It surprised him to find how naturally he fell back into his old habit of discussing things with himself, and how completely and calmly he accepted the fact that his home-coming had been but a brief and wonderful interlude to his fugitivism.  He did not know it at first, but this calmness was the calmness of a despair more fatal than the menace of the hangman.

“They won’t catch me,” he encouraged himself.  “And she won’t tell them where I’m going.  No, she won’t do that.”  He found himself repeating that thought over and over again.  Mary Josephine would not betray him.  He repeated it, not as a conviction, but to fight back and hold down another thought that persisted in forcing itself upon him.  And this thing, that at times was like a voice within him, cried out in its moments of life, “She hates you—­and she will tell where you are going!”

With each hour it was harder for him to keep that voice down; it persisted, it grew stronger; in its intervals of triumph it rose over and submerged all other thoughts in him.  It was not his fear of her betrayal that stabbed him; it was the underlying motive of it, the hatred that would inspire it.  He tried not to vision her as he had seen her last, in the big chair, crushed, shamed, outraged—­seeing in him no longer the beloved brother, but an impostor, a criminal, a man whom she might suspect of killing that brother for his name and his place in life.  But the thing forced itself on him.  It was reasonable, and it was justice.

“But she won’t do it,” he told himself.  “She won’t do it.”

This was his fight, and its winning meant more to him than freedom.  It was Mary Josephine who would live with him now, and not Conniston.  It was her spirit that would abide with him, her voice he would hear in the whispers of the night, her face he would see in the glow of his lonely fires, and she must remain with him always as the Mary Josephine he had known.  So he crushed back the whispering voice, beat it down with his hands clenched at his side, fought it through the hours of that night with the desperation of one who fights for a thing greater than life.

Toward dawn the stars began to fade out of the sky.  He had been tireless, and he was tireless now.  He felt no exhaustion.  Through the gray gloom that came before day he went on, and the first glow of sun found him still traveling.  Prince Albert and the Saskatchewan were thirty miles to the south and east of him.

He stopped at last on the edge of a little lake and unburdened himself of his pack for the first time.  He was glad that the premonition of just such a sudden flight as this had urged him to fill his emergency grub-sack yesterday morning.  “Won’t do any harm for us to be prepared,” he had laughed jokingly to Mary Josephine, and Mary Josephine herself had made him double the portion of bacon because she was fond of it.  It was hard for him to slice that bacon without a lump rising in his throat.