and that, feeling
their way, partly sensing it, and always ascending toward the stars.
Roger McKay did not speak again to Peter. Each time he came out where
the sky was clear he looked toward the solitary dark pinnacle, far up
and ahead, strangely resembling a giant tombstone in the star-glow, that
was their guide. And after many minutes of strange climbing, in which
it seemed to Jolly Roger the nail-heads in the soles of his boots made
weirdly loud noises on the rocks, they came near to the top.

There they stopped, and in a deeply shadowed place where there was a
carpet of soft sand, with walls of rock close on either side, Jolly
Roger spread out his blankets. Then he went out from the black shadow,
so that a million stars seemed not far away over their heads. Here he
sat down, and began to smoke, thinking of what tomorrow would hold for
him, and of the many days destined to follow that tomorrow. Nowhere in
the world was there to be--for him--the peace of an absolute certainty.
Not until he felt the cold steel of iron bars with his two hands, and
the fatal game had been played to the end.

There was no corrosive bitterness of the vengeful in Jolly Roger's
heart. For that reason even his enemies, the Police, had fallen into the
habit of using the nickname which the wilderness people had given him.
He did not hate these police. Curiously, he loved them. Their type
was to him the living flesh and blood of the finest manhood since the
Crusaders. And he did not hate the law. At times the Law, as personified
in all of its unswerving majesty, amused him. It was so terribly serious
over such trivial things--like himself, for instance. It could not
seem to sleep or rest until a man was hanged, or snugly put behind hard
steel, no matter how well that man loved his human-kind--and the
world. And Jolly Roger loved both. In his heart he believed he had not
committed a crime by achieving justice where otherwise there would have
been no justice. Yet outwardly he cursed himself for a lawbreaker. And
he loved life. He loved the stars silently glowing down at him tonight.
He loved even the gray, lifeless rock, which recalled to his imaginative
genius the terrific and interesting life that had once existed--he loved
the ghostly majesty of the grave-like pinnacle that rose above him, and
beyond that he loved all the world.

But most of all, more than his own life or all that a thousand lives
might hold for him, he loved the violet-eye