for holding up Government mails, or
for any of his other misdemeanors. It would hang him for the murder of
Jed Hawkins. And the minions of the law would laugh at the truth, even
if he told it--which he never would. More than once his imaginative
genius had drawn up a picture of that impossible happening. For it was
a truth so inconceivable that he found the absurdity of it a grimly
humorous thing. Even Nada believed he had killed her scoundrelly
foster-father. Yet it was she--herself--who had killed him! And it was
Nada whom the law would hang, if the truth was known--and believed.

Frequently he went back over the scenes of that tragic night at Cragg's
Ridge when all the happiness in the world seemed to be offering itself
to him--the night when Nada was to go with him to the Missioner's, to
become his wife, And then--the dark trail--the disheveled girl
staggering to him through the starlight, and her sobbing story of how
Jed Hawkins had tried to drag her through the forest to Mooney's cabin,
and how--at last--she had saved herself by striking him down with a
stick which she had caught up out of the darkness. Would the police
believe HIM--an outlaw--if he told the rest of the story?--how he had
gone back to give Jed Hawkins the beating of his life, and had found
him dead in the trail, where Nada had struck him down? Would they
believe him if, in a moment of cowardice, he told them that to protect
the girl he loved he had fastened the responsibility of the crime upon
himself? No, they would not. He had made the evidence too complete. The
world would call him a lying yellow-back if he betrayed what had
actually happened on the trail between Cragg's Ridge and Mooney's cabin.

And this, after all, was the one remaining bit of happiness in Jolly
Roger's heart, the knowledge that he had made the evidence utterly
complete, and that Nada would never know, and the world would never
know--the truth. His love for the blue-eyed girl-woman who had given
her heart and her soul into his keeping, even when she knew he was an
outlaw, was an undying thing, like his love for the mother of years
ago. "It will be easy to die for her," he told Peter, and this, in the
end, was what he knew he was going to do. Thought of the inevitable did
not make him afraid. He was determined to keep his freedom and his life
as long as he could, but he was fatalistic enough, and sufficiently
acquainted with the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, to know what th