“Everything that’s got a breath of life must kill—­up to a certain point,” Jolly Roger explained to him, repeating the lesson over and over.  “And that isn’t wrong, Peter.  The sin is in killing when you don’t have to.  See that tree over there, with a vine as big as my wrist winding around it, like a snake?  Well, that vine is choking the life out of the tree, and in time the tree will die.  But the vine is doing just what God A’mighty meant it to do.  It needs a tree to live on.  But I’m going to cut the vine, because I think more of the tree than I do the vine.  That’s my privilege—­ following my conscience.  And we’re eating young partridges tonight, because we had to have something to keep us alive.  It’s the necessity of the thing that counts, Peter.  Think you can understand that?”

It was pretty hard for Peter at first, but he was observant, and his mind worked quickly.  The crime of destroying birdlings in their nest, or on the ground, was impressed upon him.  He began to understand there was a certain humiliating shame attached to an attack upon a creature weaker than himself, unless there was a reason for it.  He looked chiefly to his master for decisions in the matter.  Snowshoe rabbits, young and half grown, were very tame in this month of August, and ordinarily he would have destroyed many of them in a day’s travel.  But unless Jolly Roger gave him a signal, or he was hungry, he would pass a snowshoe unconcernedly.  This phase of Peter’s development interested Jolly Roger greatly.  The outlaw’s philosophy had not been punctured by the egotistical “I am the only reasoning being” arguments of narrow-gauged nature scientists.  He believed that Peter possessed not only a brain and super-instinct, but also a very positive reasoning power which he was helping to develop.  And the process was one that fascinated him.  When he was not sleeping, or traveling, or teaching Peter he was usually reading the wonderful little red volumes of history which he had purloined from the mail sledge up near the Barren Lands.  He knew their contents nearly by heart.  His favorites were the life-stories of Napoleon, Margaret of Anjou, and Peter the Great, and always when he compared his own troubles with the difficulties and tragedies over which these people had triumphed he felt a new courage and inspiration, and faced the world with better cheer.  If Nature was his God and Bible, and Nada his Angel, these finger-worn little books written by a man half a century dead were voices out of the past urging him on to his best.  Their pages were filled with the vivid lessons of sacrifice, of courage and achievement, of loyalty, honor and dishonor—­and of the crashing tragedy which comes always with the last supreme egoism and arrogance of man.  He marked the dividing lines, and applied them to himself.  And he told Peter of his conclusions.  He felt a consuming tenderness for the glorious Margaret of Anjou, and his heart thrilled one day when a voice seemed to whisper to him out of the printed page that Nada was another Margaret—­only more wonderful because she was not a princess and a queen.