useless mass of upheaved rock at the end of Cragg's Ridge. They
had never seen an animal or a blade of grass in all its gray, sun-
blasted sterility. It was like a hostile thing, overhung with a
half-dead, slow-beating something that was like the dying pulse of
an evil thing. And now darkness added to its mystery and its
unfriendliness as Peter nosed close at his master's heels. Up and
up they picked their way, over and between ragged upheavals of
rock, twisting into this broken path and that, feeling their way,
partly sensing it, and always ascending toward the stars. Roger
McKay did not speak again to Peter. Each time he came out where
the sky was clear he looked toward the solitary dark pinnacle, far
up and ahead, strangely resembling a giant tombstone in the star-
glow, that was their guide. And after many minutes of strange
climbing, in which it seemed to Jolly Roger the nail-heads in the
soles of his boots made weirdly loud noises on the rocks, they
came near to the top.

There they stopped, and in a deeply shadowed place where there was
a carpet of soft sand, with walls of rock close on either side,
Jolly Roger spread out his blankets. Then he went out from the
black shadow, so that a million stars seemed not far away over
their heads. Here he sat down, and began to smoke, thinking of
what tomorrow would hold for him, and of the many days destined to
follow that tomorrow. Nowhere in the world was there to be--for
him--the peace of an absolute certainty. Not until he felt the
cold steel of iron bars with his two hands, and the fatal game had
been played to the end.

There was no corrosive bitterness of the vengeful in Jolly Roger's
heart. For that reason even his enemies, the Police, had fallen