door, and in the
cabin. The woman's eyes were red and wild as she stared at him, and she
stopped her moaning, and her hands unclasped. Jolly Roger went nearer
and bent over her and shivered at the half-mad terror he saw in her
face.

"Where is Nada?" he demanded. "Tell me--where is she?"

"Gone, gone, gone," crooned the woman, clutching her hands at her
breast again. "Jed has taken her--taken her to Mooney's shack, over
near the railroad. Oh, my God!--I tried to keep her, but I couldn't. He
dragged her away, and tonight he's sellin' her to Mooney--the
devil--the black brute--the tie-cutter--"

She choked, and began rocking herself back and forth, and the moaning
came again from her thin lips. Fiercely McKay gripped her by the
shoulder.

"Mooney's shack--where?" he cried. "Quick! Tell me!"

"A thousand--a thousand--he's givin' a thousand dollars to git her in
the shack--alone," she cried in a dull, sing-song voice. "The road out
there leads straight to it. Near the railroad. A mile. Two miles. I
tried to keep him from doin' it, but I couldn't--I couldn't--"

Jolly Roger heard no more. He was out of the door, and running across
the open, with Peter racing close behind him. They struck the road, and
Jolly Roger swung into it, and continued to run until the breath was
out of his lungs. And all that time the things Nada had told him about
Jed Hawkins and the tie-cutter were rushing madly through his brain. An
hour or two ago, when the words had come from her lips in the jackpine
thicket, he had believed that Nada was frightened, that a distorted
fear possessed her, that such a thing as she had half confessed to him
was too monstrous to happen. And now he cried out aloud, a groaning,
terrible cry as he went on. Hawkins and Nada had reached Mooney's shack
long before this, a shack buried deep in the wilderness, a shack from
which no cries could be heard--

Peter, trotting behind, whined at what he heard in Jolly Roger McKay's
panting voice. And the moon shone on them as they staggered and ran,
and here and there dark clouds were racing past the face of it, and the
slumberous whisper of storm grew nearer in the air. And then came the
time when one of the dark clouds rode under the moon and the two ran on
in darkness. The cloud passed, and the moon flooded the road again with
light--and suddenly Jolly Roger stopped in his tracks, and his heart
almost broke in the strain of that moment.

Ahead of them, staggering towar