There was a silence, in which David closed his fingers tightly about the picture. And then, more insistently:
_Thud! Thud! Thud!_
He put the picture back into his pocket, and rose to his feet.
Mechanically he slipped on his coat. He went to the door, opened it softly, and pa.s.sed out into the night. The moon was above him, like a great, white disc. The sky burned with stars. He could see now to the foot of the ridge over which Mukoki had gone, and the clearing about the cabin lay in a cold and luminous glory. Tavish, if he had been caught in the twilight darkness and had waited for the moon to rise, would be showing up soon.
He walked to the side of the cabin and looked back. Quite distinctly he could see Tavish"s meat, suspended from a stout sapling that projected straight out from under the edge of the roof. It hung there darkly, a little in shadow, swinging gently in the wind that had risen, and tap-tap-tapping against the logs. David moved toward it, gazing at the edge of the forest in which he thought he had heard a sound that was like the creak of a sledge runner. He hoped it was Tavish returning. For several moments he listened with his back to the cabin. Then he turned.
He was very close to the thing hanging from the sapling. It was swinging slightly. The moon shone on it, and then--Great G.o.d! A face--a human face! A face, bearded, with bulging, staring eyes, gaping mouth--a grin of agony frozen in it! And it was tapping, tapping, tapping!
He staggered back with a dreadful cry. He swayed to the door, groped blindly for the latch, stumbled in clumsily, like a drunken man. The horror of that lifeless, grinning face was in his voice. He had awakened the Missioner, who was sitting up, staring at him.
"Tavish ..." cried David chokingly; "Tavish--is dead!" and he pointed to the end of the cabin where they could hear again that _tap-tap-tapping_ against the log wall.
CHAPTER XII
Not until afterward did David realize how terribly his announcement of Tavish"s death must have struck into the soul of Father Roland. For a few seconds the Missioner did not move. He was wide awake, he had heard, and yet he looked at David dumbly, his two hands gripping his blanket.
When he did move, it was to turn his face slowly toward the end of the cabin where the thing was hanging, with only the wall between. Then, still slowly, he rose to his feet.
David thought he had only half understood.
"Tavish--is dead!" he repeated huskily, straining to swallow the thickening in his throat. "He is out there--hanging by his neck--dead!"
_Dead!_ He emphasized that word--spoke it twice.
Father Roland still did not answer. He was getting into his clothes mechanically, his face curiously ashen, his eyes neither horrified nor startled, but with a stunned look in them. He did not speak when he went to the door and out into the night. David followed, and in a moment they stood close to the thing that was hanging where Tavish"s meat should have been. The moon threw a vivid sort of spotlight on it. It was grotesque and horrible--very bad to look at, and unforgettable. Tavish had not died easily. He seemed to shriek that fact at them as he swung there dead; even now he seemed more terrified than cold. His teeth gleamed a little. That, perhaps, was the worst of it all. And his hands were clenched tight. David noticed that. Nothing seemed relaxed about him.
Not until he had looked at Tavish for perhaps sixty full seconds did Father Roland speak. He had recovered himself, judging from his voice.
It was quiet and unexcited. But in his first words, unemotional as they were, there was a significance that was almost frightening.
"At last! She made him do that!"
He was speaking to himself, looking straight into Tavish"s agonized face. A great shudder swept through David. _She!_ He wanted to cry out.
He wanted to know. But the Missioner now had his hands on the gruesome thing in the moonlight, and he was saying:
"There is still warmth in his body. He has not been long dead. He hanged himself, I should say, not more than half an hour before we reached the cabin. Give me a hand, David!"
With a mighty effort David pulled himself together. After all, it was nothing more than a dead man hanging there. But his hands were like ice as he seized hold of it. A knife gleamed in the moonlight over Tavish"s head as the Missioner cut the rope. They lowered Tavish to the snow, and David went into the cabin for a blanket. Father Roland wrapped the blanket carefully about the body so that it would not freeze to the ground. Then they entered the cabin. The Missioner threw off his coat and built up the fire. When he turned he seemed to notice for the first time the deathly pallor in David"s face.
"It shocked you--when you found it there," he said. "_Ugh!_ I don"t wonder. But I ... David, I didn"t tell you I was expecting something like this. I have feared for Tavish. And to-night when the dogs and Mukoki signalled death I was alarmed--until we found the fire in the stove. It didn"t seem reasonable then. I thought Tavish would return.
The dogs were gone, too. He must have freed them just before he went out there. Terrible! But justice--justice, I suppose. G.o.d sometimes works His ends in queer ways, doesn"t He?"
"What do you mean?" cried David, again fighting that thickening in his throat. "Tell me, Father! I must know. Why did he kill himself?"
His hand was clutching at his breast, where the picture lay. He wanted to tear it out, in this moment, and demand of Father Roland whether this was the face--the girl"s face--that had haunted Tavish.
"I mean that his fear drove him at last to kill himself," said Father Roland in a slow, sure voice, as if carefully weighing his words before speaking them. "I believe, now, that he terribly wronged some one, that his conscience was his fear, and that it haunted him by bringing up visions and voices until it drove him finally to pay his debt. And up here conscience is _mitoo aye chikoon_--the Little Brother of G.o.d. That is all I know. I wish Tavish had confided in me, I might have saved him."
"Or--punished," breathed David.
"My business is not to punish. If he had come to me, asking help for himself and mercy from his G.o.d, I could not have betrayed him."
He was putting on his coat again.
"I am going after Mukoki," he said. "There is work to be done, and we may as well get through with it by moonlight. I don"t suppose you feel like sleep?"
David shook his head. He was calmer now, quite recovered from the first horror of his shock, when the door closed behind Father Roland. In the thoughts that were swiftly readjusting themselves in his mind there was no very great sympathy for the man who had hanged himself. In place of that sympathy the oppression of a thing that was greater than disappointment settled upon him heavily, driving from him his own personal dread of this night"s ghastly adventure, and adding to his suspense of the last forty-eight hours a hopelessness the poignancy of which was almost like that of a physical pain. Tavish was dead, and in dying he had taken with him the secret for which David would have paid with all he was worth in this hour. In his despair, as he stood there alone in the cabin, he muttered something to himself. The desire possessed him to cry out aloud that Tavish had cheated him. A strange kind of rage burned within him and he turned toward the door, with clenched hands, as if about to rush out and choke from the dead man"s throat what he wanted to know, and force his glazed and staring eyes to look for just one instant on the face of the girl in the picture. In another moment his brain had cleared itself of that insane fire. After all, would Tavish kill himself without leaving something behind? Would there not be some kind of an explanation, written by Tavish before he took the final step? A confession? A letter to Father Roland? Tavish knew that the Missioner would stop at his cabin on his return into the North. Surely he would not kill himself without leaving some work for him--at least a brief accounting for his act!
He began looking about the cabin again, swiftly and eagerly at first, for if Tavish had written anything he would beyond all doubt have placed the paper in some conspicuous place: pinned it at the end of his bunk, or on the wall, or against the door. They might have overlooked it, or possibly it had fallen to the floor. To make his search surer David lowered the lamp from its bracket in the ceiling and carried it in his hand. He went into dark corners, scrutinized the floor as well as the walls, and moved garments from their wooden pegs. There was nothing.
Tavish had cheated him again! His eyes rested finally on the chest. He placed the lamp on a stool, and tried the lid. It was unlocked. As he lifted it he heard voices indistinctly outside. Father Roland had returned with Mukoki. He could hear them as they went to where Tavish was lying with his face turned up to the moon.
On his knees he began pawing over the stuff in the chest. It was a third filled with odds and ends--little else but trash; tangled ends of _babiche_, a few rusted tools, nails and bolts, a pair of half-worn shoe packs--a mere litter of disappointing rubbish. The door opened behind him as he was rising to his feet. He turned to face Mukoki and the Missioner.
"There is nothing," he said, with a gesture that took in the room. "He hasn"t left any word that I can find."
Father Roland had not closed the door.
"Mukoki will help you search. Look in his clothing on the wall. Tavish must surely have left--something."
He went out, shutting the door behind him. For a moment he listened to make sure that David was not going to follow him. He hurried then to the body of Tavish, and stripped off the blanket. The dead man was terrible to look at, with his open gla.s.sy eyes and his distorted face, and the moonlight gleaming on his grinning teeth. The Missioner shuddered.
"I can"t guess," he whispered, as if speaking to Tavish. "I can"t guess--quite--what made you do it, Tavish. But you haven"t died without telling me. I know it. It"s there--in your pocket."
He listened again, and his lips moved. He bent over him, on one knee, and averted his eyes as he searched the pockets of Tavish"s heavy coat.
Against the dead man"s breast he found it, neatly folded, about the size of foolscap paper--several pages of it, he judged, by the thickness of the packet. It was tied with fine threads of _babiche_, and in the moonlight he could make out quite distinctly the words, "For Father Roland, G.o.d"s Lake--Personal." Tavish, after all, had not made himself the victim of sudden fright, of a momentary madness. He had planned the affair in a quite business-like way. Premeditated it with considerable precision, in fact, and yet in the end he had died with that stare of horror and madness in his face. Father Roland spread the blanket over him again after he had placed the packet in his own coat. He knew where Tavish"s pick and shovel were hanging at the back of the cabin and he brought these tools and placed them beside the body. After that he rejoined David and the Cree.
They were still searching, and finding nothing.
"I have been looking through his clothes--out there," said the Missioner, with a shuddering gesture which intimated that his task had been as fruitless as their own. "We may as well bury him. A shallow grave, close to where his body lies. I have placed a pick and a shovel on the spot." He spoke to David: "Would you mind helping Mukoki to dig?
I would like to be alone for a little while. You understand. There are things...."
"I understand, Father."
For the first time David felt something of the awe of this thing that was death. He had forgotten, almost, that Father Roland was a servant of G.o.d, so vitally human had he found him, so unlike all other men of his calling he had ever known. But it was impressed upon him now, as he followed Mukoki. Father Roland wanted to be alone. Perhaps to pray. To ask mercy for Tavish"s soul. To plead for its guidance into the Great Unknown. The thought quieted his own emotions, and as he began to dig in the hard snow and frozen earth he tried to think of Tavish as a man, and not as a monster.
In the cabin Father Roland waited until he heard the beat of the pick before he moved. Then he fastened the cabin door with a wooden bolt and sat himself down at the table, with the lamp close to his bent head and Tavish"s confession in his hands. He cut the _babiche_ threads with his knife, unfolded the sheets of paper and began to read, while Tavish"s mice nosed slyly out of their murky corners wondering at the new and sudden stillness in the cabin and, it may be, stirred into restlessness by the absence of their master.
The ground under the snow was discouragingly hard. To David the digging of the grave seemed like chipping out bits of flint from a solid block, and he soon turned over the pick to Mukoki. Alternately they worked for an hour, and each time that the Cree took his place David wondered what was keeping the Missioner so long in the cabin. At last Mukoki intimated with a sweep of his hands and a hunch of his shoulders that their work was done. The grave looked very shallow to David, and he was about to protest against his companion"s judgment when it occurred to him that Mukoki had probably digged many holes such as this in the earth, and had helped to fill them again, so it was possible he knew his business.
After all, why did people weigh down one"s last slumber with six feet of soil overhead when three or four would leave one nearer to the sun, and make not quite so chill a bed? He was thinking of this as he took a last look at Tavish. Then he heard the Indian give a sudden grunt, as if some one had poked him unexpectedly in the pit of the stomach. He whirled about, and stared.
Father Roland stood within ten feet of them, and at sight of him an exclamation rose to David"s lips and died there in an astonished gasp.
He seemed to be swaying, like a sick man, in the moonlight, and impelled by the same thought Mukoki and David moved toward him. The Missioner extended an arm, as if to hold them back. His face was ghastly, and terrible--almost as terrible as Tavish"s, and he seemed to be struggling with something in his throat before he could speak. Then he said, in a strange, forced voice that David had never heard come from his lips before: