me by achieving justice where
otherwise there would have been no justice. Yet outwardly he cursed
himself for a lawbreaker. And he loved life. He loved the stars
silently glowing down at him tonight. He loved even the gray, lifeless
rock, which recalled to his imaginative genius the terrific and
interesting life that had once existed--he loved the ghostly majesty of
the grave-like pinnacle that rose above him, and beyond that he loved
all the world.

But most of all, more than his own life or all that a thousand lives
might hold for him, he loved the violet-eyed girl who had come into his
life from the desolation and unhappiness of Jed Hawkins' cabin.

Forgetting the law, forgetting all but her, he went at last into the
dungeon-like gloom between the rocks, and after Peter had wallowed
himself a bed in the carpet of sand they fell asleep.

They awoke with the dawn. But for three days thereafter they went forth
only at night, and for three days did not show themselves above the
barricade of rocks. The Stew-Kettle was what Jolly Roger had called it,
and when the sun was straight above, or descending with the last half
of the day, the name fitted.

It was a hot place, so hot that at a distance its piled-up masses of
white rock seemed to simmer and broil in the blazing heat of the July
sun. Neither man nor beast would look into the heart of it, Jolly Roger
had assured Peter, unless the one was half-witted and the other a fool.
Looking at it from the meadowy green plain that lay between the Ridge
and the forest their temporary retreat was anything but a temptation to
the eye. Something had happened there a few thousand centuries before,
and in a moment of evident spleen and vexation the earth had vomited up
that pile of rock debris, and Jolly Roger good humoredly told himself
and Peter that it was an act of Providence especially intended for
them, though planned and erupted some years before they were born.

The third afternoon of their hiding, Jolly Roger decided upon action.

This afternoon all of the caloric guns of an unclouded sun had seemed
to concentrate themselves on the gigantic rock-pile. Though it was now
almost sunset, a swirling and dizzying incandescence still hovered
about it. The huge masses of stone were like baked things to the touch
of hand and foot, and one breathed a smoldering air in between their
gray and white walls.

Thus forbidding looked the Stew-Kettle, when viewed from the plain. But
from