It dispelled fear, and if ever there were devils lurking in the edge of old Indian Tom's swamp they slunk away at the sound of it.

And more than once, as those who lived in tepee and cabin and far-away shack could testify, that laugh had driven back death itself.
In the shack, this last day of May afternoon, stood leaning over a rough table the man of the laugh--Roger McKay, known as Jolly Roger, outlaw extraordinary, and sought by the men of every Royal Northwest Mounted Police patrol north of the Height of Land.
It was incongruous and inconceivable to think of him as an outlaw, as he stood there in the last glow of the sun--an outlaw with the weirdest and strangest record in all the northland hung up against his name.

He was not tall, and neither was he short, and he was as plump as an apple and as rosy as its ripest side.

There was something cherubic in the smoothness and the fullness of his face, the clear gray of his eyes, the fine-spun blond of his short-cropped hair, and the plumpness of his hands and half-bared arms.

He was a priestly, well-fed looking man, was this Jolly Roger, rotund and convivial in all his proportions, and some in great error would have called him fat.