supper just about ready to be served. On a little stove in the farthest
corner of the shack the breasts of two spruce partridges were turning
golden brown in a skittle, and from the broken neck of a coffee pot a
rich perfume was rising with the steam. Piping hot in the open oven half
a dozen baked potatoes were waiting in their crisp brown jackets.

From the table Jolly Roger turned, rubbing his hands and chuckling as he
went for a third time to a low shelf built against the cabin wall. There
he carefully raised a mass of old papers from a box, and at the movement
there came a protesting squeak, and a little brown mouse popped up
to the edge of it and peered at him with a pair of bright little
questioning eyes.

"You little devil!" he exulted. "You nervy little devil!"

He raised the papers higher, and again looked upon his discovery of half
an hour ago. In a soft nest lay four tiny mice, still naked and blind,
and as he lowered the mass of papers the mother burrowed back to them,
and he could hear her squeaking and chirruping to the little ones, as if
she was trying to tell them not to be afraid of this man, for she knew
him very well, and it wasn't in his mind to hurt them. And Jolly Roger,
as he returned to the setting of his table, laughed again--and the laugh
rolled out into the golden sunset, and from the top of a spruce at the
edge of the creek a big blue-jay answered it in a riotous challenge.

But at the bottom of that laugh, if one could have looked a bit deeper,
was something more than the naked little mice in the nest of torn-up
paper. Today happiness had strangely come this gay-hearted freebooter's
way, and he might have reached out, and seized it, and have kept it for
his own. But in the hour of his opportunity he had refused it--because
he was an outlaw--because strong within him was a peculiar code of honor
all his own. There was nothing of man-made religion in the soul of Roger
McKay. Nature was his god; its manifestations, its life, and the air it
gave him to breathe were the pages which made up the Book that guided
him. And within the last hour, since the sun had begun to drop behind
the tips of the tallest trees, these things had told him that he was
a fool for turning away from the one great thing in all life--simply
because his own humors of existence had made him an outcast and hunted
by the laws of men. So the change had come, and for a space his soul was
filled with the thrill of song and lau