ng
came again from her thin lips. Fiercely McKay gripped her by the
shoulder.

"Mooney's shack--where?" he cried. "Quick! Tell me!"

"A thousand--a thousand--he's givin' a thousand dollars to git her in
the shack--alone," she cried in a dull, sing-song voice. "The road out
there leads straight to it. Near the railroad. A mile. Two miles. I
tried to keep him from doin' it, but I couldn't--I couldn't--"

Jolly Roger heard no more. He was out of the door, and running across
the open, with Peter racing close behind him. They struck the road, and
Jolly Roger swung into it, and continued to run until the breath was out
of his lungs. And all that time the things Nada had told him about Jed
Hawkins and the tie-cutter were rushing madly through his brain. An
hour or two ago, when the words had come from her lips in the jackpine
thicket, he had believed that Nada was frightened, that a distorted fear
possessed her, that such a thing as she had half confessed to him
was too monstrous to happen. And now he cried out aloud, a groaning,
terrible cry as he went on. Hawkins and Nada had reached Mooney's shack
long before this, a shack buried deep in the wilderness, a shack from
which no cries could be heard--

Peter, trotting behind, whined at what he heard in Jolly Roger McKay's
panting voice. And the moon shone on them as they staggered and ran,
and here and there dark clouds were racing past the face of it, and the
slumberous whisper of storm grew nearer in the air. And then came the
time when one of the dark clouds rode under the moon and the two ran on
in darkness. The cloud passed, and the moon flooded the road again with
light--and suddenly Jolly Roger stopped in his tracks, and his heart
almost broke in the strain of that moment.

Ahead of them, staggering toward them, sobbing as she came, was Nada.
Jolly Roger's blazing eyes saw everything in that vivid light of the
moon. Her hair was tangled and twisted about her shoulders and over her
breast. One arm was bare where the sleeve had been torn away, and her
girlish breast gleamed white where her waist had been stripped half from
her body. And then she saw Jolly Roger in the trail, with wide-open,
reaching arms, and with a cry such as Peter had never heard come from
her lips before she ran into them, and held up her face to him in the
yellow moon-light. In her eyes--great, tearless, burning pools--he saw
the tragedy and yet it was only that, and not horror, not despair, NOT