the treetops. And
at night after they had built their little cooking fire in the deepest
heart of the bush he would lie half awake during the hours of darkness,
the watchfulness of his senses never completely dulled in the stupor of
sleep.

Since the night they had stopped at the settler's cabin Jolly Roger's
face had grown grayer and thinner. A number of times he had tried to
assure himself what he would do in that moment which was coming when he
would stand face to face with Breault the man-hunter. His caution, after
he left Fort William, was in a way an automatic instinct that worked for
self-preservation in face of the fact that he was growing less and less
concerned regarding Breault's appearance. It was not in his desire
to delay the end much longer. The chase had been a long one, with its
thrills and its happiness at times, but now he was growing tired and
with Nada gone there was only hopeless gloom ahead. If she were dead he
wanted to go to her. That thought was a dawning pleasure in his breast,
and it was warm in his heart when he tied in a hard knot the buckskin
string which locked the flap of his pistol holster. When Breault
overtook him the law would know, because of the significance of this
knot, that he had welcomed the end of the game.

Never in the northland had there come a spring more beautiful than this
of the year in which McKay and his dog went through the deep wilds to
Pashkokogon Lake. In a few hours, it seemed, the last chill died out of
the air and there came the soft whispers of those bridal-weeks between
May and Summer, a month ahead of their time. But Jolly Roger, for the
first time in his life, failed to respond to the wonder and beauty of
the earth's rejoicing. The first flowers did not fill him with the old
joy. He no longer stood up straight, with expanding chest, to drink in
the rare sweetness of air weighted with the tonic of balsams and cedar
spruce. Vainly he tried to lift up his soul with the song and bustle
of mating things. There was no longer music for him in the flood-time
rushing of spring waters. An utter loneliness filled the cry of the
loon. And all about him was a vast emptiness from which the spirit of
life had fled for him.

Thus he came at last to a stream in the Burntwood country which ran into
Pashkokogon Lake; and it was this day, in the mellow sunlight of late
afternoon, that they heard coming to them from out of the dense forest
the chopping of an axe.

Toward