“A few days later, while drunk, he missed his footing and fell from a ledge to his death.  His wife, poor creature, wished him buried in sight of the cabin door—­”

But in this moment Roger McKay was thinking less of Breault the Ferret and the loosening of the hangman’s rope from about his neck than he was of another thing.  And Father John was saying in a voice that seemed far away and unreal: 

“We’ve sent out word to all parts of the north, hoping someone would find you and send you back.  And she has prayed each night, and each hour of the day the same prayer has been in her heart and on her lips.  And now—­”

Someone was coming to them from the direction of the cabin—­ someone, a girl, and she was singing,

McKay’s face went whiter than the gray ash of fire.

“My God,” he whispered huskily.  “I thought—­she had died!”

It was only then Father John understood the meaning of what he had seen in his face.

“No, she is alive,” he cried.  “I sent her straight north through the bush with an Indian the day after the fire.  And later I left word for you with the Fire Relief Committee at Fort Wiliam, where I thought you would first enquire.”

“And it was there,” said Jolly Roger, “that I did not enquire at all!”

In the edge of the clearing, close to the thicket of timber, Nada had stopped.  For across the open space a strange looking creature had raced at the sound of her voice; a dog with bristling Airedale whiskers, and a hound’s legs, and wild-wolf’s body hardened and roughened by months of fighting in the wilderness.  As in the days of his puppyhood, Peter leapt up against her, and a cry burst from Nada’s lips, a wild and sobbing cry of Peter, Peter, Peter—­and it was this cry Jolly Roger heard as he tore away from Father John.

On her knees, with her arms about Peter’s shaggy head, Nada stared wildly at the clump of timber, and in a moment she saw a man break out of it, and stand still, as if the mellow sunlight blinded him, and made him unable to move.  And the same choking weakness was at her own heart as she rose up from Peter, and reached out her arms toward the gray figure in the edge of the wood, sobbing, trying to speak and yet saying no word.

And a little slower, because of his age, Father John came a moment later, and peered out with the knowledge of long years from a thicket of young banksians, and when he saw the two in the open, close in each other’s arms, and Peter hopping madly about them, he drew out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes, and went back then for the axe which he had dropped in the timber clump.

There was a great drumming in Jolly Roger’s head, and for a time he failed even to hear Peter yelping at their side, for all the world was drowned in those moments by the breaking sobs in Nada’s breath and the wild thrill of her body in his arms; and he saw nothing but the upturned face, crushed close against his breast, and the wide-open eyes, and the lips to kiss.  And even Nada’s face he seemed to see through a silvery mist, and he felt her arms strangely about his neck, as if it was all half like a dream—­a dream of the kind that had come to him beside his campfire.  It was a little cry from Nada that drove the unreality away.