When Peter came back, just in the last sunset glow of the evening, he found his master alone in the bit of jackpine opening, and Nada was swiftly crossing the larger meadow that lay between them and the break in Cragg’s Ridge, beyond which was Jed Hawkins’ cabin.  It was not the same Jolly Roger whom he had left half an hour before.  It was not the man of the hiding-place in the rock-pile.  Jolly Roger McKay, standing there in the last soft glow of the day, was no longer the fugitive and the outcast.  He stood with silent lips, yet his soul was crying out its gratitude to all that God of Life which breathed its sweetness of summer evening about him.  He was the First Possessor of the earth.  In that hour, that moment, he would not have sold his place for all the happiness of all the remaining people in the world.  He cried out aloud, and Peter, squatted at his feet with his red tongue lolling out, listened to him.

“She is mine, mine, mine,” he was saying, and he repeated that word over and over, until Peter quirked his ears, and wondered what it meant.  And then, seeing Peter, Jolly Roger laughed softly, and bent over him, with a look of awe and wonderment mingling with the happiness in his face.

“She’s mine—­ours,” he cried boyishly.  “God A’mighty took a hand, Pied-Bot, and she’s going with us!  We’re going tonight, when the moon comes up.  And Peter—­Peter—­we’re going straight to the Missioner’s, and he’ll marry us, and then we’ll hit for a place where no one in the world will ever find us.  The law may want us, Pied-Bot, but God—­this God all around—­is good to us.  And we’ll try and pay Him back.  We will, Peter!”

He straightened himself, and faced the west.  Then he picked up the bundle Nada had brought, and dived through the jackpines, with Peter at his heels.  Swiftly they moved through the shadowing dusk of the plain, and came at last to the Stew-Kettle, and to their hiding-place under the shoulders of Gog and Magog.  There was still a faint twilight in the tunnel, and in this twilight Jolly Roger McKay packed his possessions; and then, with fingers that trembled as if they were committing a sacrilege, he drew Nada’s few treasures from her bundle and placed them tenderly with his own.  And all the time Peter heard him saying things under his breath, so softly that it was like the whispered drone of song.

In darkness they went down through the rocks to the plain, and half an hour later they came to the break in the Ridge, and went through it, and stopped in the black shadow of a great rock, with Jed Hawkins’ cabin half a rifle-shot away.  Here Nada was to come to them with the first rising of the moon.