of half an hour ago. In a soft nest lay four tiny mice, still
naked and blind, and as he lowered the mass of papers the mother
burrowed back to them, and he could hear her squeaking and
chirruping to the little ones, as if she was trying to tell them
not to be afraid of this man, for she knew him very well, and it
wasn't in his mind to hurt them. And Jolly Roger, as he returned
to the setting of his table, laughed again--and the laugh rolled
out into the golden sunset, and from the top of a spruce at the
edge of the creek a big blue-jay answered it in a riotous
challenge.

But at the bottom of that laugh, if one could have looked a bit
deeper, was something more than the naked little mice in the nest
of torn-up paper. Today happiness had strangely come this gay-
hearted freebooter's way, and he might have reached out, and
seized it, and have kept it for his own. But in the hour of his
opportunity he had refused it--because he was an outlaw--because
strong within him was a peculiar code of honor all his own. There
was nothing of man-made religion in the soul of Roger McKay.
Nature was his god; its manifestations, its life, and the air it
gave him to breathe were the pages which made up the Book that
guided him. And within the last hour, since the sun had begun to
drop behind the tips of the tallest trees, these things had told
him that he was a fool for turning away from the one great thing
in all life--simply because his own humors of existence had made
him an outcast and hunted by the laws of men. So the change had
come, and for a space his soul was filled with the thrill of song
and laughter.

Half an hour ago he believed that he had definitely made up his