in ghostly gloom. It was forty degrees below zero.
And he was glad, even with this sickness of despair in his heart, that
she was not a fugitive with him tonight.

Yet he built up a little make-believe world for himself as he sat with
a blanket hugged close about him, staring into the fire. In a hundred
different ways he saw her face, a will-o-the-wisp thing amid the
flames; an illusive, very girlish, almost childish face--yet always
with the light of a woman's soul shining in it. That was the miracle
which startled him at last. It seemed as if the fiction he built up in
his despair transformed itself subtly into fact and that her soul had
come to him from out of the southland and was speaking to him with eyes
which never changed or faltered in their adoration, their faith and
their courage. She seemed to come to him, to creep into his arms under
the folds of the blanket and he sensed the soft crush of her hair, the
touch of her lips, the warm encircling of her arms about his neck.
Closer to him pressed the mystery, until the beating of her heart was a
living pulse against him; and then--suddenly, as an irresistible
impulse closed his arms to hold the spirit to him, his eyes were drawn
to the heart of the fire, and he saw there for an instant, wide-eyed
and speaking to him, the face of Yellow Bird the Indian sorceress. The
flames crept up the long braids of her hair, her lips moved, and then
she was gone--but slowly, like a ghost slipping upward into the mist of
smoke and night.

Peter heard his master's cry. And after that Jolly Roger rose up and
threw off the blanket and walked back and forth until his feet trod a
path in the snow. He told himself it was madness to believe, and yet he
believed. Faith fought itself back into that dark citadel of his heart
from which for a time it had been driven. New courage lighted up again
the black chaos of his soul. And at last he fell down on his knees and
gripped Peter's shaggy head between his two hands.

"_Pied-Bot_, she said everything would come out right in the end," he
cried, a new note in his voice. "That's what Yellow Bird told us,
wasn't it? Mebby they would have burned her as a witch a long time ago
because she's a sorceress, and says she can send her soul out of her
body and see what we can't see. _But we believe_!" His voice choked up,
and he laughed. "They were both here tonight," he added. "Nada--and
Yellow Bird. And I believe--I believe--I know what it means!"