ng, and not right, in refusing to
accept the love and companionship which she had begged him to accept, in
spite of all that had happened and all that might happen?

Day by day he slowly won for himself, and at last, as they traveled in
the direction of Yellow Bird's country, he crushed the final doubt that
oppressed him, and knew that he was right. In his selfishness he had not
shackled her to an outlaw. He had left her free. Life and hope and other
happiness were ahead of her. He had not destroyed her, and this thought
would strengthen him and leave something of gladness in his heart,
even in that gray dawn when the law would compel him to make his final
sacrifice.

It is a strange peace which follows grief, a secret happiness no other
soul but one can understand. Out of it excitement and passion have been
burned, and it is then the Great God of things comes more closely into
the possession of his own. And now, as they went westward and north
toward the Wollaston Lake country, this peace possessed Jolly Roger. It
mellowed his world. It was half an ache, half a steady and undying pain,
but it drew Life nearer to him than he had ever known it before. His
love for the sun and the sky, for the trees and flowers and all growing
things of the earth was more worship of the divine than a love for
physical things, and each day he felt it drawing more closely about him
in its comradeship, whispering to him of its might, and of its power to
care for him in the darkest hours of stress that might come.

He did not travel fast after he had reached the decision to go to Yellow
Bird's people. And he tried to imagine, a great deal of the time, that
Nada was with him. He succeeded in a way that bewildered Peter, for
quite frequently the man talked to someone who was not there.

The slowness and caution with which they traveled developed Peter's
mental faculties with marvelous swiftness. His master, free of egoism
and prejudice, had placed him on a plane of intimate equality, and Peter
struggled each day to live up a little more to the responsibility of
this intimacy and confidence. Instinct, together with human training,
taught him woodcraft until in many ways he was more clever than his
master. And along with this Jolly Roger slowly but surely impressed upon
him the difference between wanton slaughter and necessary killing.

"Everything that's got a breath of life must kill--up to a certain
point," Jolly Roger explained to him, re