ere Josephine Tavish was awake. Jolly Roger pantomimed his
desire as she sat up. He wanted something from one of the packs. She
nodded. On his knees he fumbled in the dunnage, and when he rose to his
feet, facing the girl, her eyes opened wide at what he held in his
hand--a small packet of old newspapers her father was taking to the
factor at Fort Churchill. She saw the hungry, apologetic look in his
eyes, and her woman's heart understood. She smiled gently at him, and
her lips formed an unvoiced whisper of gratitude as he turned to go. At
the door he looked back. He thought she was beautiful then, with her
shining hair and eyes, and her lips parted, and her hands half reaching
out to him, as if in that moment of parting she was giving him courage
and faith. Suddenly she pressed the palms of her fingers to her mouth
and sent the kiss of benediction to him through the twilight glow of
the snow-room.

A moment later, crawling through his tunnel with Peter close behind
him, there was an exultant singing in Jolly Roger's heart. Again he was
fleeing from the law, but always, as Yellow Bird had predicted in her
sorcery, there were happiness and hope in his going. And always there
was someone to urge him on, and to take a pride in him, like Josephine
Tavish.

He broke through the dune-crust at the end of his tunnel and crawled
out into the thick, gray dawn of a barren-land day. The sky was heavy
overhead, and the wind had died out. It was the beginning of the brief
lull which came in the second day of the Great Storm.

McKay laughed softly as he sensed the odds against them.

"We'll be having the storm at our heels again before long, _Pied-Bot_,"
he said. "We'd better make for the timber a dozen miles south."

He struck out, circling the dune, so that he was traveling straight
away from the first hole he had cut through the shell of the drift.
From that door, made by the outlaw who had saved them, Josephine Tavish
watched the shadowy forms of man and dog until they were lost in the
gray-white chaos of a frozen world.

CHAPTER XV

Through the blizzard Jolly Roger made his way a score of miles
southward from the big dune on the Barren. For a day and a night he
made his camp in the scrub timber which edged the vast treeless tundras
reaching to the Arctic. He believed he was safe, for the unceasing wind
and the blasts of shot-like snow filled his tracks a few moments after
they were made. He struck a straight line