Mooney--the devil--the black brute--the tie-cutter--"

She choked, and began rocking herself back and forth, and the
moaning came again from her thin lips. Fiercely McKay gripped her
by the shoulder.

"Mooney's shack--where?" he cried. "Quick! Tell me!"

"A thousand--a thousand--he's givin' a thousand dollars to git her
in the shack--alone," she cried in a dull, sing-song voice. "The
road out there leads straight to it. Near the railroad. A mile.
Two miles. I tried to keep him from doin' it, but I couldn't--I
couldn't--"

Jolly Roger heard no more. He was out of the door, and running
across the open, with Peter racing close behind him. They struck
the road, and Jolly Roger swung into it, and continued to run
until the breath was out of his lungs. And all that time the
things Nada had told him about Jed Hawkins and the tie-cutter were
rushing madly through his brain. An hour or two ago, when the
words had come from her lips in the jackpine thicket, he had
believed that Nada was frightened, that a distorted fear possessed
her, that such a thing as she had half confessed to him was too
monstrous to happen. And now he cried out aloud, a groaning,
terrible cry as he went on. Hawkins and Nada had reached Mooney's
shack long before this, a shack buried deep in the wilderness, a
shack from which no cries could be heard--

Peter, trotting behind, whined at what he heard in Jolly Roger
McKay's panting voice. And the moon shone on them as they