She did not finish.  Jolly Roger thrust her out from him, arm’s length.  A cloud under the moon hid his face.  But his voice was low, and terrible.

“Nada, go to the Missioner’s as fast as you can,” he said, fighting to speak coolly.  “Take Peter—­and go.  You will make it before the storm breaks.  I am going back to have a few words with Jed Hawkins—­alone.  Then I will join you, and the Missioner will marry us—­”

The cloud was gone, and he saw joy and radiance in her face.  Fear had disappeared.  Her eyes were luminous with the golden glow of the night.  Her red lips were parted, entreating him with the lure of their purity and love, and for a moment he held her close in his arms again, kissing her as he might have kissed an angel, while her little hands stroked his face, and she laughed softly and strangely in her happiness—­the wonder of a woman’s soul rising swiftly out of the sweetness of her girlhood.

And then Jolly Roger set her firmly in the direction she was to go.

“Hurry, little girl,” he said.  “Hurry—­before the storm breaks!”

She went, calling Peter softly, and Jolly Roger strode down the trail, not once looking back, and bent only upon the vengeance he would this night wreak upon the two lowest brutes in creation.  Never before had he felt the desire to kill.  But he felt that desire now.  Before the night was much older he would do unto Hawkins and Mooney as Hawkins had done unto Peter.  He would leave them alive, but broken and crippled and forever punished.

And then he stumbled over something in another darkening of the moon.  He stopped, and the light came again, and he looked down into the upturned face of Jed Hawkins.  It was a distorted and twisted face, and its one eye was closed.  The body did not move.  And close to the head was the club which Nada had used.

Jolly Roger laughed grimly.  Fate was kind to him in making a half of his work so easy.  But he wanted Hawkins to rouse himself first.  Roughly he stirred him with the toe of his boot.

“Wake up, you fiend,” he said.  “I’m going to break your bones, your arms, your legs, just as you broke Peter—­and that poor old woman back in the cabin.  Wake up!”

Jed Hawkins made no stir.  He was strangely limp.  For many seconds Jolly Roger stood looking down at him, his eyes growing wider, more staring.  Darkness came again.  It was an inky blackness this time, like a blotter over the world.  Low thunder came out of the west.  The tree-tops whispered in a frightened sort of way.  And Jolly Roger could hear his heart beating.  He dropped upon his knees, and his hands moved over Jed Hawkins.  For a space not even Peter could have heard his movement or his breath.

In the ebon darkness he rose to his feet, and the night—­ lifelessly still for a moment—­heard the one choking word that came from his lips.

“Dead!”