man's laughter.
In this late afternoon the last flooding gold of the sun filled the
open door of the poplar shack. The man's laughter, like the sun on the
mottled tapestry of the poplar-wood, was a heart-lightening thing there
on the edge of the great swamp that swept back for miles to the north
and west. It was the sort of laughter one seldom hears from a man, not
riotous of over-bold, but a big, clean laughter that came from the soul
out. It was an infectious thing. It drove the gloom out of the blackest
night. It dispelled fear, and if ever there were devils lurking in the
edge of old Indian Tom's swamp they slunk away at the sound of it. And
more than once, as those who lived in tepee and cabin and far-away shack
could testify, that laugh had driven back death itself.

In the shack, this last day of May afternoon, stood leaning over a rough
table the man of the laugh--Roger McKay, known as Jolly Roger, outlaw
extraordinary, and sought by the men of every Royal Northwest Mounted
Police patrol north of the Height of Land.

It was incongruous and inconceivable to think of him as an outlaw, as he
stood there in the last glow of the sun--an outlaw with the weirdest and
strangest record in all the northland hung up against his name. He was
not tall, and neither was he short, and he was as plump as an apple
and as rosy as its ripest side. There was something cherubic in the
smoothness and the fullness of his face, the clear gray of his eyes,
the fine-spun blond of his short-cropped hair, and the plumpness of his
hands and half-bared arms. He was a priestly, well-fed looking man, was
this Jolly Roger, rotund and convivial in all his proportions, and some
in great error would have called him fat. But it was a strange kind of
fatness, as many a man on the trail could swear to. And as for sin, or
one sign of outlawry, it could not be found in any mark upon him--unless
one closed his eyes to all else and guessed it by the belt and revolver
holster which he wore about his rotund waist. In every other respect
Jolly Roger appeared to be not only a harmless creature, but one
especially designed by the Creator of things to spread cheer and
good-will wherever he went. His age, if he had seen fit to disclose it,
was thirty-four.

There seemed, at first, to be nothing that even a contented man might
laugh at in the cabin, and even less to bring merriment from one on
whose head a price was set--unless it was the delicious aroma of a