cut
off his hand first. He said that! And then he said--if I didn't think it
was wrong--he'd like to kiss me--"

She hugged Peter up close to her again.

"And--I told him I guessed it wasn't wrong, because I liked him, and
nobody else had ever kissed me, and--Peter--he didn't kiss me! And when
he went away he looked so queer--so white-like--and somethin' inside me
has been singing ever since. I don't know what it is, Peter. But it's
there!"

And then, after a moment.

"Peter," she whispered, "I wish Mister Jolly Roger would take us away!"

The thought drew a tightening to her lips, and the pucker of a frown
between her eyes, and she sat Peter down beside her and looked over
the valley to the black forest, in the heart of which was Jolly Roger's
cabin.

"It's funny he don't want anybody to know he's there, ain't it--I
mean--isn't it, Peter?" she mused. "He's livin' in the old shack Indian
Tom died in last winter, and I've promised not to tell. He says it's a
great secret, and that only you, and I, and the Missioner over at Sucker
Creek know anything about it. I'd like to go over and clean up the shack
for him. I sure would."

Peter, beginning to nose among the rocks, did not see the flash of fire
that came slowly into the blue of the girl's eyes. She was looking at
her ragged shoes, at the patched stockings, at the poverty of her faded
dress, and her fingers clenched in her lap.

"I'd do it--I'd go away--somewhere--and never come back, if it wasn't
for her," she breathed. "She treats me like a witch most of the time,
but Jed Hawkins made her that way. I kin remember--"

Suddenly she jumped up, and flung back her head defiantly, so that her
hair streamed out in a sun-filled cloud in a gust of wind that came up
the valley.

"Some day, I'll kill 'im," she cried to the black forest across the
plain. "Some day--I will!"

CHAPTER II

She followed Peter. For a long time the storm had been gathering in her
brain, a storm which she had held back, smothered under her unhappiness,
so that only Peter had seen the lightning-flashes of it. But today the
betrayal had forced itself from her lips, and in a hard little voice
she had told Jolly Roger--the stranger who had come into the black
forest--how her mother and father had died of the same plague more than
ten years ago, and how Jed Hawkins and his woman had promised to keep
her for three silver fox skins which her father had caught before the
sickness came. Th