She choked, and began rocking herself back and forth, and the moaning came again from her thin lips.  Fiercely McKay gripped her by the shoulder.

“Mooney’s shack—­where?” he cried.  “Quick!  Tell me!”

“A thousand—­a thousand—­he’s givin’ a thousand dollars to git her in the shack—­alone,” she cried in a dull, sing-song voice.  “The road out there leads straight to it.  Near the railroad.  A mile.  Two miles.  I tried to keep him from doin’ it, but I couldn’t—­I couldn’t—­”

Jolly Roger heard no more.  He was out of the door, and running across the open, with Peter racing close behind him.  They struck the road, and Jolly Roger swung into it, and continued to run until the breath was out of his lungs.  And all that time the things Nada had told him about Jed Hawkins and the tie-cutter were rushing madly through his brain.  An hour or two ago, when the words had come from her lips in the jackpine thicket, he had believed that Nada was frightened, that a distorted fear possessed her, that such a thing as she had half confessed to him was too monstrous to happen.  And now he cried out aloud, a groaning, terrible cry as he went on.  Hawkins and Nada had reached Mooney’s shack long before this, a shack buried deep in the wilderness, a shack from which no cries could be heard—­

Peter, trotting behind, whined at what he heard in Jolly Roger McKay’s panting voice.  And the moon shone on them as they staggered and ran, and here and there dark clouds were racing past the face of it, and the slumberous whisper of storm grew nearer in the air.  And then came the time when one of the dark clouds rode under the moon and the two ran on in darkness.  The cloud passed, and the moon flooded the road again with light—­and suddenly Jolly Roger stopped in his tracks, and his heart almost broke in the strain of that moment.

Ahead of them, staggering toward them, sobbing as she came, was Nada.  Jolly Roger’s blazing eyes saw everything in that vivid light of the moon.  Her hair was tangled and twisted about her shoulders and over her breast.  One arm was bare where the sleeve had been torn away, and her girlish breast gleamed white where her waist had been stripped half from her body.  And then she saw Jolly Roger in the trail, with wide-open, reaching arms, and with a cry such as Peter had never heard come from her lips before she ran into them, and held up her face to him in the yellow moon-light.  In her eyes—­great, tearless, burning pools—­he saw the tragedy and yet it was only that, and not horror, not despair, not the other thing.  His arms closed crushingly about her.  Her slim body seemed to become a part of him.  Her hot lips reached up and clung to his.

And then,

“Did—­he get you—­to—­Mooney’s shack—­” He felt her body stiffen against him.

“No,” she panted.  “I fought—­every inch.  He dragged me, and hit me, and tore my clothes—­but I fought.  And up there—­in the trail —­he turned his back for a moment, when he thought I was done, and I hit him with a club.  And he’s there, now, on his back—­”