ed closer.

"Mebby I'm bad, and mebby the law ought to have me," Jolly Roger went
on in the darkness, "but until tonight I never made up my mind to kill
a man. I'm ready--now. If Jed Hawkins hurts her again we're goin' to
kill him! Understand, _Pied-Bot_?"

He got up, and Peter could hear him undressing. Then he made a nest for
Peter on the floor, and stretched himself out in the bunk; and after
that, for a long time, there seemed to be something heavier than the
gloom of night in the cabin for Peter, and he listened and waited and
prayed in his dog way for Nada's return, and wondered why it was that
she left him so long. And the Night People held high carnival under the
yellow moon, and there was flight and terror and slaughter in the glow
of it--and Jolly Roger slept, and the wolf howled nearer, and the creek
chortled its incessant song of running water, and in the end Peter's
eyes closed, and a red-eyed ermine peeped over the sill into the
man-and dog-scented stillness of the outlaw's cabin.

For many days after this first night in the cabin, Peter did not see
Nada. There was more rain, and the creek flooded higher, so that each
time Jolly Roger went over to Cragg's Ridge he took his life in his
hands in fording the stream. Peter saw no one but Jolly Roger, and at
the end of the second week he was going about on his mended leg. But
there would always be a limp in his gait, and always his right
hind-foot would leave a peculiar mark in the trail.

These two weeks of helplessness were an education in Peter's life and
were destined to leave their mark upon him always. He learned to know
Jolly Roger, not alone from seeing events, but through an intuitive
instinct that grew swiftly somewhere in his shrewd head. This instinct,
given widest scope in these weeks of helplessness, developed faster
than any other in him, until in the end, he could judge Jolly Roger's
humor by the sound of his approaching footsteps. Never was there a
waking hour in which he was not fighting to comprehend the mystery of
the change that had come over his life. He knew that Nada was gone, and
each day that passed put her farther away from him, yet he also sensed
the fact that Jolly Roger went to her, and when the outlaw returned to
the cabin Peter was filled with a yearning hope that Nada was returning
with him.

But gradually Peter came to think less about Nada, and more about Jolly
Roger, until at last his heart beat with a love for this man