He stood up again, and Peter saw the old smile on his master’s lips as Jolly Roger looked up into the swirling black canopy of the spruce-tops.  And the wailing of the storm seemed no longer to hold menace and taunt, but in it he heard the whisper of fierce, strong voices urging upon him the conviction that had already swept indecision from his heart.

And then he said, holding out his arms as if encompassing something which he could not see.

“Peter, we’re going back to Nada!”

Dawn was a scarcely perceptible thing when it came.  Darkness seemed to fade a little, that was all.  Frosty shapes took form in the gloom, and the spruce-tops became tangible in an abyss of sepulchral shadow overhead.

Through this beginning of the barren-land day Jolly Roger set out in the direction of his cabin and in his blood was that new singing thing of fire and warmth that more than made up for the hours of sleep he had lost during the night.  The storm was dying out, he thought, and it was growing warmer; yet the wind whistled and raved in the open spaces and his thermometer registered the fortieth and a fraction degree below zero.  The air he breathed was softer, he fancied, yet it was still heavy with the stinging shot of blizzard; and where yesterday he had seen only the smothering chaos of twisted spruce and piled up snow, there was now—­as the pale day broadened—­his old wonderland of savage beauty, awaiting only a flash of sunlight to transform it into the pure glory of a thing indescribable.  But the sun did not come and Jolly Roger did not miss it over-much for his heart was full of Nada, and a-thrill with the inspiration of his home-going.

“That’s what it means, going home” he said to Peter, who nosed close in the path of his snowshoes.  “There’s a thousand miles between us and Cragg’s Ridge, a thousand miles of snow and ice—­ and hell, mebby.  But we’ll make it!”

He was sure of himself now.  It was as if he had come up from out of the shadow of a great sickness.  He had been unwise.  He had not reasoned as a man should reason.  The hangman might be waiting for him at Cragg’s Ridge, down on the rim of civilization, but that same grim executioner was also pursuing close at his heels.  He would always be pursuing in the form of a Breault, a Cassidy, a Tavish, or a Somebody Else of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police.  It would be that way until the end came.  And when the end did come, when they finally got him, the blow would be easier at Cragg’s Ridge than up here on the edge of the Barren Land.

And again there was hope, a wild, almost unbelievable hope that with Nada he might find that place which Yellow Bird, the sorceress, had promised for them—­that mystery-place of safety and of happiness which she had called The Country Beyond, where “all would end well.”  He had not the faith of Yellow Bird’s people; he was not superstitious enough to believe fully in her sorcery, except that he seized