Page:Cornelia Meigs-The Pirate of Jasper Peak.djvu/244

 come near him, and his terrible, helpless suffering from his frozen hands and feet made her feel that she must call for aid.

“When white man give up—wave white flag,” she said and pointed upward toward where she had raised the signal on the roof. That was the end of her story.

To all of it Jake had listened, with never a change of expression, never moving his eyes from  Hugh, powerless to interrupt or to deny. Only when the Indian woman once mentioned Linda  Ingmarsson’s name there was a change, a momentary wincing and a quivering of those steady  eyes. Perhaps Hugh’s sensibilities had been sharpened by his recent experiences, for certainly  he guessed quickly and as surely as though some  one had told him that Jake must have loved Linda  long ago, but that his bullying ways had failed  before her courageous scorn of him.

“Old—live hard—die,” said Laughing Mary again when she came to the end. Such was her only comment on the fall of that once-feared  master of Jasper Peak.