gg's Ridge, beyond which was Jed Hawkins' cabin. It was not the
same Jolly Roger whom he had left half an hour before. It was not the
man of the hiding-place in the rock-pile. Jolly Roger McKay, standing
there in the last soft glow of the day, was no longer the fugitive and
the outcast. He stood with silent lips, yet his soul was crying out its
gratitude to all that God of Life which breathed its sweetness of
summer evening about him. He was the First Possessor of the earth. In
that hour, that moment, he would not have sold his place for all the
happiness of all the remaining people in the world. He cried out aloud,
and Peter, squatted at his feet with his red tongue lolling out,
listened to him.

"She is mine, mine, mine," he was saying, and he repeated that word
over and over, until Peter quirked his ears, and wondered what it
meant. And then, seeing Peter, Jolly Roger laughed softly, and bent
over him, with a look of awe and wonderment mingling with the happiness
in his face.

"She's mine--ours," he cried boyishly. "God A'mighty took a hand,
_Pied-Bot_, and she's going with us! We're going tonight, when the moon
comes up. And Peter--Peter--we're going straight to the Missioner's,
and he'll marry us, and then we'll hit for a place where no one in the
world will ever find us. The law may want us, _Pied-Bot_, but God--this
God all around--is good to us. And we'll try and pay Him back. We will,
Peter!"

He straightened himself, and faced the west. Then he picked up the
bundle Nada had brought, and dived through the jackpines, with Peter at
his heels. Swiftly they moved through the shadowing dusk of the plain,
and came at last to the Stew-Kettle, and to their hiding-place under
the shoulders of Gog and Magog. There was still a faint twilight in the
tunnel, and in this twilight Jolly Roger McKay packed his possessions;
and then, with fingers that trembled as if they were committing a
sacrilege, he drew Nada's few treasures from her bundle and placed them
tenderly with his own. And all the time Peter heard him saying things
under his breath, so softly that it was like the whispered drone of
song.

In darkness they went down through the rocks to the plain, and half an
hour later they came to the break in the Ridge, and went through it,
and stopped in the black shadow of a great rock, with Jed Hawkins'
cabin half a rifle-shot away. Here Nada was to come to them with the
first rising of the moon.

It was very still all