kin git to the Injun
village. 'Taint fur, now--acrost this flat an' then dip down onto the
river--What's that!" The man halted abruptly and stared. "It's one of
'em now!" he faltered, with tongue and lips that felt stiff. "An' it's
covered with fine white ashes!" He knew that he was trembling in every
limb, as he stared at the snow-covered object that stood stiffly beside
the trail only a few yards ahead. "Nuthin' but a stump," he said, and
laughed, quaveringly. "Sure--it's a stump--with snow on it. I remember
that stump. No--it wasn't here where the stump was. Yes, it was. It
looks different with the snow on it. Gosh, a'mighty, it's a ghost! No
'taint--'taint moved. That's the stump. I remember it. I says to Moran,
'There's a stump.' An' Moran says, 'Yup, that's a stump.'" He cut
viciously at his dogs with the whip. "Hi yu there! Mush-u!"

At the door of the little cabin Connie Morgan stared wide-eyed at the
thing that lay in the snow. Schooled as he was to playing a man's part
in the drama of the last great frontier, the boy stood horror-stricken
at the savage suddenness of the tragedy that had been enacted before his
eyes. A few seconds before, he had been in the power of Black Moran,
known far and wide as the hardest man in the North. And, now, there was
no Black Moran--only a grotesquely sprawled _thing_--and a slush of
crimson snow. The boy was conscious of no sense of regret--no thought of
self-condemnation--for he knew too well the man's record. This man who
had lived in open defiance of the laws of God and of man had met swift
death at the hand of the savage law of the North. The law that the men
of the outlands do not seek to explain, but believe in
implicitly--because they have seen the workings of that law. It is an
inexorable law, cruel, and cold, and hard--as hard as the land it
governs with its implacable justice. It is the law of retribution--and
its sentence is PAY.

Black Moran had paid. He had played his string out--had come to the end
of his trail. And Connie knew that justice had been done. Nevertheless,
as the boy stood there in the silence of the barrens and stared down at
the sprawling form, he felt strangely impressed--horrified. For, after
all, Black Moran had been a human being, and one--the boy shuddered at
the thought--who, with murder in his heart, had been ill equipped for
passing suddenly into the presence of his God.

With tight-pressed lips the boy dragged the body into the cabin and