tongue lolling out,
listened to him.

"She is mine, mine, mine," he was saying, and he repeated that word over
and over, until Peter quirked his ears, and wondered what it meant. And
then, seeing Peter, Jolly Roger laughed softly, and bent over him, with
a look of awe and wonderment mingling with the happiness in his face.

"She's mine--ours," he cried boyishly. "God A'mighty took a hand,
Pied-Bot, and she's going with us! We're going tonight, when the moon
comes up. And Peter--Peter--we're going straight to the Missioner's, and
he'll marry us, and then we'll hit for a place where no one in the world
will ever find us. The law may want us, Pied-Bot, but God--this God all
around--is good to us. And we'll try and pay Him back. We will, Peter!"

He straightened himself, and faced the west. Then he picked up the
bundle Nada had brought, and dived through the jackpines, with Peter at
his heels. Swiftly they moved through the shadowing dusk of the plain,
and came at last to the Stew-Kettle, and to their hiding-place under
the shoulders of Gog and Magog. There was still a faint twilight in the
tunnel, and in this twilight Jolly Roger McKay packed his possessions;
and then, with fingers that trembled as if they were committing a
sacrilege, he drew Nada's few treasures from her bundle and placed them
tenderly with his own. And all the time Peter heard him saying things
under his breath, so softly that it was like the whispered drone of
song.

In darkness they went down through the rocks to the plain, and half an
hour later they came to the break in the Ridge, and went through it,
and stopped in the black shadow of a great rock, with Jed Hawkins' cabin
half a rifle-shot away. Here Nada was to come to them with the first
rising of the moon.

It was very still all about, and Peter sensed a significance in the
silence, and lay very quietly watching the light in the cabin, and the
shadowy form of his master. Also he knew that somewhere in the distance
a storm was gathering. The breath of it was in the air, though the sky
was clear of cloud overhead, except for the haze of a gray and ghostly
mist that lay between them and the yellow stars. Jolly Roger counted the
seconds between then and moonrise. It seemed hours before the golden
rim of it rose in the east. Shadows grew swiftly after that. Grotesque
things took shape. The rock-caps of the ridge began to light up, like
timid signal-fires. Black spruce and balsam and cedar gliste