Something came to relieve the tenseness of the moment for Jolly
Roger. Peter, nosing in a thick patch of bunch-grass, put out a
huge snowshoe rabbit, and the two crashed in a startling avalanche
through the young jackpines, Peter's still puppyish voice yelling
in a high staccato as he pursued. Jolly Roger turned from Nada,
and stared where they had gone. But he was seeing nothing. He knew
the hour of his mightiest fight had come. In the reckless years of
his adventuring he had more than once faced death. He had starved.
He had frozen. He had run the deadliest gantlets of the elements,
of beast, and of man. Yet was the strife in him now the greatest
of all his life. His heart thumped. His brain was swirling in a
vague and chaotic struggle for the mastery of things, and as he
fought with himself--his unseeing eyes fixed on the spot where
Peter and the snowshoe rabbit had disappeared--he heard Nada's
voice behind him, saying again that she was going with him and
Peter. In those seconds he felt himself giving way, and the
determined action he had built up for himself began to crumble
like sand. He had made his confession and in spite of it this
young girl he worshipped--sweeter and purer than the flowers of
the forest--was urging herself upon him! And his soul cried out
for him to turn about, and open his arms to her, and gather her
into them for as long as God saw fit to give him freedom and life.

But still he fought against that mighty urge, dragging reason and
right back fragment by fragment, while Nada stood behind him, her
wide-open, childishly beautiful eyes beginning to comprehend the
struggle that was disrupting the heart of this man who was an
outlaw--and her god among men. And when Jolly Roger turned, his
face had aged to the grayness of stone, and his eyes were dull,
and there was a terribly dead note in his voice.