y filled with an exhilarating tonic. Its deadness was gone. Its
weight had lifted. A ripple broke the star gleams where an increasing
breeze touched the surface of the lake. And the thrill of adventure
stirred in his blood. He laughed as he put his skill and strength in the
sweep of his paddle, and for a time the thought that he was an outlaw,
and in losing Nada had lost everything in life worth righting for, was
not so oppressive. It was the old, joyous laugh, stirred by his sense of
humor, and the trick he had played on Cassidy. He could imagine Cassidy
back on the shore, his temper redder than his hair as he cursed and tore
up the sand in his search for another canoe.

"We're inseparable," Jolly Roger explained to Peter. "Wherever I go,
Cassidy is sure to follow. You see, it's this way. A long time
ago someone gave Cassidy what they call an assignment, and in that
assignment it says 'go get Jolly Roger McKay, dead or alive'--or
something to that effect. And Cassidy has been on the job ever since.
But he can't quite catch up with me, Pied-Bot. I'm always a little
ahead."

And yet, even as he laughed, there was in Jolly Roger's heart a yearning
to which he had never given voice. Half a dozen times he might have
killed Cassidy, and an equal number of times Cassidy might have killed
him. But neither had taken advantage of the opportunity to destroy.
They had played the long and thrilling game like men, and because of the
fairness and sportsmanship of the man who hunted him Jolly Roger thought
of Cassidy as he might have thought of a brother, and more than once he
yearned to go to him, and hold out his hand in friendship. Yet he knew
Corporal Cassidy was the deadliest menace the earth held for him,
a menace that had followed him like a shadow through months and
years--across the Barren Lands, along the rim of the Arctic, down the
Mackenzie, and back again--a menace that never tired, and was never
far behind in that ten thousand miles of wilderness they had covered.
Together in the bloodstirring game of One against One they had faced the
deadliest perils of the northland. They had gone hungry, and cold, and
more than once a thousand miles of nothingness lay behind them, and
death seemed preferable to anything that might lie ahead. Yet in that
aloneness, when companionship was more precious than anything else on
earth, neither had cried quits. The game had gone on, Cassidy after his
man--and Jolly Roger McKay fighting for