e
ultimate of the thing would be. And yet, with tragedy behind him, and a
still grimmer tragedy ahead, the soul of Jolly Roger was not dead or in
utter darkness. In it, waking and sleeping, he enshrined the girl who
had been willing to give up all other things in the world for him, who
had pleaded with him in the last hour of storm down on the edge of
civilization that she be given the privilege of accompanying him
wherever his fate might lead. That he was an outlaw had not destroyed
her faith in him. That he had killed a man--a man unfit to live--had
only drawn her arms more closely about him, and had made her more
completely a part of him. And a thousand times the maddening thought
possessed Jolly Roger--was he wrong, and not right, in refusing to
accept the love and companionship which she had begged him to accept,
in spite of all that had happened and all that might happen?

Day by day he slowly won for himself, and at last, as they traveled in
the direction of Yellow Bird's country, he crushed the final doubt that
oppressed him, and knew that he was right. In his selfishness he had
not shackled her to an outlaw. He had left her free. Life and hope and
other happiness were ahead of her. He had not destroyed her, and this
thought would strengthen him and leave something of gladness in his
heart, even in that gray dawn when the law would compel him to make his
final sacrifice.

It is a strange peace which follows grief, a secret happiness no other
soul but one can understand. Out of it excitement and passion have been
burned, and it is then the Great God of things comes more closely into
the possession of his own. And now, as they went westward and north
toward the Wollaston Lake country, this peace possessed Jolly Roger. It
mellowed his world. It was half an ache, half a steady and undying
pain, but it drew Life nearer to him than he had ever known it before.
His love for the sun and the sky, for the trees and flowers and all
growing things of the earth was more worship of the divine than a love
for physical things, and each day he felt it drawing more closely about
him in its comradeship, whispering to him of its might, and of its
power to care for him in the darkest hours of stress that might come.

He did not travel fast after he had reached the decision to go to
Yellow Bird's people. And he tried to imagine, a great deal of the
time, that Nada was with him. He succeeded in a way that bewildered
Peter, for quit