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Updated: June 12, 2025
Peter went to her, and dropped down, with his head in her lap, and looking up through his bushy eye-brows he saw a livid bruise just under the ripples of her brown hair, where there had been no mark yesterday, or the day before. Nada's hands drew him closer, until he was half in her lap, and she bent her face down to him, so that her thick, shining hair fell all about him.
It was Nada's cry, a cry wild and sobbing and filled with gladness, that told him the truth, and with the precious paper clutched in her hand she smothered her face against McKay's breast, while Breault came up grinning behind them, and Jolly Roger heard the click of his key in the handcuffs. "I am also loaded down with a number of foolish messages for you," he said, attending to the fire again.
He pressed his lips to the silken tress of Nada's hair, still damp with the rain; and after that, with the care of a miser he smoothed it out, and tied the end of the tress tightly with a string, and put it away in the soft buckskin wallet which he carried. There was a new singing in his heart as he gathered sticks with which to build a small fire, for after this he would not travel quite alone.
"Pied-Bot, you devil you little devil " His fingers closed in the cloth about Peter's neck, and his heart jumped when he saw what it was a piece of Nada's dress. Peter, realizing that at last the importance of his mission was understood, waited in eager watchfulness while his master untied the knot.
"I won't go, Nada," he cried, trying to laugh. "I promise cross my heart and hope to die! I won't go until you tell me I can." And then, feeling that something had almost gone wrong for a moment, Peter yipped from his nest in the bunk, and the gladness in Nada's eyes thanked Jolly Roger for his promise when he came back with the coffee pot.
The sudden stopping of his breath the tightening of his arms drew Nada's shining eyes to his face, and then she, too, saw the little old Missioner as he swayed and staggered across the clearing. With a cry she was out of McKay's arms and running toward him. Father John was leaning heavily upon her when McKay came up. His face was tense and his breath came in choking gasps.
The last faint gleam of the alcohol lamp died out. Jolly Roger did not look back. Blindly he stumbled ahead, counting his footsteps as he went, and shouting Nada's name. Twice he thought he heard a reply, and each time the will-o'-the-wisp voice seemed to be still farther ahead of him. Then, with a fiercer blast of the wind beating upon his back, he stumbled and fell forward upon his face.
It was in Indian Tom's cabin, with Cragg's Ridge just beyond the creek, and it was in those days before Terence Cassidy had come to drive them to another hiding place; in the happy days of Nada's visits and of their trysts under the Ridge, when even the little gray mother mouse lived in a paradise with her nest of babies in the box on their cabin shelf.
But the man did not strike, nor did he reach out to grip his fingers in the silken mass of Nada's hair. He laughed, as if something was choking him, and turned away with a toss of his arms. "You ain't seein' me hit her any more, are you, Nady?" he said, and disappeared around the end of the cabin. The girl laid a hand on the woman's arm. Her eyes softened, but she was trembling.
It chanced that on this day of Nada's death and at that same hour of dawn I, Mopo, came from my mission back to the kraal of the People of the Axe, having succeeded in my end, for that great chief whom I had gone out to visit had hearkened to my words. As the light broke I reached the town, and lo! it was a blackness and a desolation.
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