From the little old cabin of dead Indian Tom, built in a grassy
glade close to the shore of Sucker Creek, came the sound of a
man's laughter. In this late afternoon the last flooding gold of
the sun filled the open door of the poplar shack. The man's
laughter, like the sun on the mottled tapestry of the poplar-wood,
was a heart-lightening thing there on the edge of the great swamp
that swept back for miles to the north and west. It was the sort
of laughter one seldom hears from a man, not riotous of over-bold,
but a big, clean laughter that came from the soul out. It was an
infectious thing. It drove the gloom out of the blackest night. It
dispelled fear, and if ever there were devils lurking in the edge
of old Indian Tom's swamp they slunk away at the sound of it. And
more than once, as those who lived in tepee and cabin and far-away
shack could testify, that laugh had driven back death itself.

In the shack, this last day of May afternoon, stood leaning over a
rough table the man of the laugh--Roger McKay, known as Jolly
Roger, outlaw extraordinary, and sought by the men of every Royal
Northwest Mounted Police patrol north of the Height of Land.

It was incongruous and inconceivable to think of him as an outlaw,
as he stood there in the last glow of the sun--an outlaw with the
weirdest and strangest record in all the northland hung up against
his name. He was not tall, and neither was he short, and he was as
plump as an apple and as rosy as its ripest side. There was
something cherubic in the smoothness and the fullness of his face,
the clear gray of his eyes, the fine-spun blond of his short-
cropped hair, and the plumpness of his hands and half-bared arms.
He was a priestly, well-fed looking man, was this Jolly Roger,
rotund and convivial in all his proportions, and some in great