chill crept to his finger-tips, and unconsciously, in a childish
sort of way, he sobbed between his clenched teeth. The thunder was
rolling nearer, and it was like a threatening voice, a deep-toned
booming of a thing inevitable and terrible. He felt the air shivering
about him, and suddenly something moved softly against his foot, and he
heard a questioning whine. It was Peter--come back to him in this hour
when he needed a living thing to give him courage. With a groan he
dropped on his knees again, and clutched his hands about Peter.

"My God," he breathed huskily. "Peter, she's killed him. And she
mustn't know. We mustn't let anyone know--"

And there he stopped, and Peter felt him growing rigid as stone, and
for many moments Jolly Roger's body seemed as lifeless as that of the
man who lay with up-turned face in the trail. Then he fumbled in a
pocket and found a pencil and an old envelope. And on the envelope,
with the darkness so thick he could not see his hand, he scribbled, "I
killed Jed Hawkins," and after that he signed his name firmly and
fully--"Jolly Roger McKay."

Then he tucked the envelope under Jed Hawkins' body, where the rain
could not get at it. And after that, to make the evidence complete, he
covered the dead man's face with his coat.

"We've got to do it, Peter," he said, and there was a new note in his
voice as he stood up on his feet again. "We've got to do it--for her.
We'll--tell her we caught Jed Hawkins in the trail and killed him."

Caution, cleverness, his old mental skill returned to him. He dragged
the boot-legger's body to a new spot, turned it face down, threw the
club away, and kicked up the earth with his boots to give signs of a
struggle.

The note in his voice was triumph--triumph in spite of its
heartbreak--as he turned back over the trail after he had finished, and
spoke to Peter.

"We may have done some things we oughtn't to, _Pied-Bot_," he said, "but
tonight I sort o' think we've tried to make--restitution. And if they
hang us, which they probably will some time, I sort o' think it'll make
us happy to know we've done it--for her. Eh, _Pied-Bot_?"

And the moon sailed out for a space, and shone on the dead whiteness of
Jolly Roger's face. And on the lips of that face was a strange, cold
smile, a smile of mastery, of exaltation, and the eyes were looking
straight ahead--the eyes of a man who had made his sacrifice for a
thing more precious to him than his God.

Only now