-if you'll let me go with you and Peter!"

She came a step nearer.

"And if I stay here Jed Hawkins is goin' to sell me to a tie-cutter
over on the railroad. That's what it is--sellin' me. I ain't--I mean
I haven't--told you before, because I was afraid of what you'd do.
But it's goin' to happen, unless you let me go with you and Peter. Oh,
Mister Roger--Mister Jolly Roger--"

Her fingers crept up his arms. They reached his shoulders, and her blue
eyes, and her red lips, and the woman's soul in her girl-body were so
close to him he could feel their sweetness and thrill, and then he saw a
slow-gathering mist, and tears--

"I'll go wherever you go," she was whispering, "And we'll hide where
they won't ever find us, and I'll be happy, so happy, Mister Roger--and
if you won't take me I want to die. Oh--"

She was crying, with her head on his breast, and her slim, half bare
arms around his neck, and Jolly Roger listened like a miser to the
choking words that came with her sobs. And where there had been tumult
and indecision in his heart there came suddenly the clearness of
sunshine and joy, and with it the happiness of a new and mighty
possession as his arms closed about her, and he turned her face up,
so that for the first time he kissed the soft red lips that for some
inscrutable reason the God of all things had given into his keeping this
day.

And then, holding her close, with her arms still tighter about his neck,
he cried softly,

"I'm goin' to take you, little girl. You're goin' with Peter and me, for
ever--and ever. And we'll go--tonight!"

When Peter came back, just in the last sunset glow of the evening, he
found his master alone in the bit of jackpine opening, and Nada was
swiftly crossing the larger meadow that lay between them and the break
in Cragg's Ridge, beyond which was Jed Hawkins' cabin. It was not the
same Jolly Roger whom he had left half an hour before. It was not the
man of the hiding-place in the rock-pile. Jolly Roger McKay, standing
there in the last soft glow of the day, was no longer the fugitive and
the outcast. He stood with silent lips, yet his soul was crying out its
gratitude to all that God of Life which breathed its sweetness of summer
evening about him. He was the First Possessor of the earth. In that
hour, that moment, he would not have sold his place for all the
happiness of all the remaining people in the world. He cried out
aloud, and Peter, squatted at his feet with his red