at came from her lips then. In an instant
she had snatched the tiny, limp thing from between the cat's paws, and
had faced him. He was laughing at her, but the glow in her blue eyes
sobered him. "I didn't think you--would take pleasure in that, Jim,"
she said. "It's only a mouse, but it's alive, and I can feel its poor
little heart beating!"

They had saved it, and he, a little ashamed at the smallness of the
act, had gone with Hester to the barn and made a nest for it in the
hay. But the wonderful words that he remembered were these: "Perhaps
some day a little mouse will help you, Jim!" Hester had spoken
laughingly. And her words had come true!

All the time that Falkner was preparing and eating his breakfast he
watched for the mouse, but it did not appear. Then he went to the door.
It swung outward, and it took all his weight to force it open. On one
side of the cabin the snow was drifted almost to the roof. Ahead of him
he could barely make out the dark shadow of the scrub spruce forest
beyond the little clearing he had made. He could hear the spruce-tops
wailing and twisting in the storm, and the snow and wind stung his
face, and half blinded him.

It was dark--dark with that gray and maddening gloom that yesterday
would have driven him still nearer to the merge of madness. But this
morning he laughed as he listened to the wailings in the air and stared
out into the ghostly chaos. It was not the thought of his loneliness
that come to him now, but the thought that he was safe. The Law could
not reach him now, even if it knew where he was. And before it began
its hunt for him again in the spring he would be hiking southward, to
the Girl and the Baby, and it would still be hunting for him when they
three would be making a new home for themselves in some other part of
the world. For the first time in months he was almost happy. He closed
and bolted the door, and began to WHISTLE. He was amazed at the change
in himself, and wonderingly he stared at his reflection in the cracked
bit of mirror against the wall. He grinned, and addressed himself aloud.

"You need a shave," he told himself. "You'd scare fits out of anything
alive! Now that we've got company we've got to spruce up, an' look
civilized."

It took him an hour to get rid of his heavy beard. His face looked
almost boyish again. He was inspecting himself in the mirror when he
heard a sound that turned him slowly toward the table. The little mouse
was nosing a