itself
to him--the night when Nada was to go with him to the Missioner's,
to become his wife, And then--the dark trail--the disheveled girl
staggering to him through the starlight, and her sobbing story of how
Jed Hawkins had tried to drag her through the forest to Mooney's cabin,
and how--at last--she had saved herself by striking him down with a
stick which she had caught up out of the darkness. Would the police
believe HIM--an outlaw--if he told the rest of the story?--how he had
gone back to give Jed Hawkins the beating of his life, and had found him
dead in the trail, where Nada had struck him down? Would they believe
him if, in a moment of cowardice, he told them that to protect the girl
he loved he had fastened the responsibility of the crime upon himself?
No, they would not. He had made the evidence too complete. The world
would call him a lying yellow-back if he betrayed what had actually
happened on the trail between Cragg's Ridge and Mooney's cabin.

And this, after all, was the one remaining bit of happiness in Jolly
Roger's heart, the knowledge that he had made the evidence utterly
complete, and that Nada would never know, and the world would never
know--the truth. His love for the blue-eyed girl-woman who had given
her heart and her soul into his keeping, even when she knew he was an
outlaw, was an undying thing, like his love for the mother of years ago.
"It will be easy to die for her," he told Peter, and this, in the end,
was what he knew he was going to do. Thought of the inevitable did not
make him afraid. He was determined to keep his freedom and his life
as long as he could, but he was fatalistic enough, and sufficiently
acquainted with the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, to know what the
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 wro