But the wolf vanished in the uncertain light as if he had really been a shadow, and his howl but the offspring of Corbett's fancy. For a few yards Ned followed in the direction in which the beast seemed to have gone, until his eyes fell upon a swelling in the snow, near to which the wolf had been when the first shot was fired.
What is that other sense which we all of us possess and for which there is no name,—that sense which is neither sight nor hearing, nor any of the other three common to our daily lives? Before Ned Corbett's eyes there lay a low swelling mound of snow, smooth white snow, still and cold in the pale moonlight. There were ten thousand other mounds just like it in the forest round him, and yet before this mound Corbett stood rooted to the ground, whilst his eyes dilated and he felt his hair rising with horror, and in the utter stillness heard his own heart thundering against his side.
Until that moment Ned Corbett had never looked upon the dead. He had heard and read of death, and knew that in his turn he too must die; but as it chanced, he had never yet seen that dumb blind thing which live men bury, saying this was a man. And yet it needed not the disappointed yell of that foul scavenger to tell him what lay beneath the snow.
Slowly he compelled himself to draw near, and stooping he completed with reverent hands what the claws of the hungry beast had already begun, and then the moon and the man, with wan white faces, looked down together upon all that remained of cheery old Rob. Corbett knew at last why there had been no peace for him in the forests that night. There was no mystery about his old comrade's death. The whole foul story of murder was written so large that the woods knew it, and were full of it. This was the story which the shuddering pines had whispered all along the trail, and at last Corbett had grasped their secret and knew what the voices kept saying.
Just where the curly hair came down upon his friend's sturdy neck, was a small dark hole; a trifling wound it looked to have killed so strong a man, and yet when the bullet struck him there, Roberts had fallen without knowing who had struck him.
Then for one moment, perhaps, the man who did this thing had stood glaring at what he had done, more afraid of the dead man at his feet than his victim had ever been of any man. The position of the body told the rest of the story. Though he could kill him, Cruickshank dared not leave those death-sharpened features staring up to heaven appealing for vengeance against the murderer, so he had seized the corpse by its wrists and dragged it away from the camp-fire, away to where the dark balsams threw their heaviest shadows, and there left it, its arms stretched out stiff and rigid for the snows to cover and hide until it should melt away into the earth whence it came.
And what was Corbett to do? Men do not weep for men—their grief lies too deep for that—and, moreover, there is nothing practical in tears.
And yet what was Corbett to do? He might hide the dead again for awhile, but in the end he would be meat for the wolf and the raven.
"Oh God!" he cried in the bitterness of his spirit, "is this nothing unto Thee? Dost Thou see what man has done?"
And even then, while the infinitely small pleaded from the depth of the forest to the Infinitely Mighty, a little wind came and shook the tops of the pines, and the dawn came.