Let me hide myself in thee."
With the last notes of the grand old hymn they all knelt, while big Dick Blake, in a voice shaken with emotion, offered a short but fervent prayer.
Manikawan's body was wrapped tightly in deerskin robes, and in the darkening twilight of the cold winter evening it was reverently borne to the newly erected platform among the spruce trees. Here it was to lie exposed to winds and storms, but beyond the reach of marauding animals, until the next summer's sun should warm and soften the earth sufficiently to permit Mookoomahn and the trappers to dig a grave and lay it in its final resting-place.
TROWBRIDGE AND GRAY, TRADERS
At the end of a week, when the supply of provisions which the trappers had brought with them was running low, Shad suggested that he was quite able to make the journey to the river tilt. His knee was now so far improved that it caused him but slight inconvenience to walk, and he was rapidly regaining strength.
He was anxious indeed to return to the tilt. He thought of it much as one thinks of home; and the thought carried with it visions of rest and comfort. The others could ill afford a longer absence from their trails, and it was therefore with a sense of deep satisfaction to all that the camp on the shore of the Great Lake was broken.
Travelling slowly, with Shad following in the well-packed trail which the others made, they arrived at their destination on an afternoon five days later, and were welcomed by Bill Campbell and Mookoomahn.
How deeply or how lightly Mookoomahn felt when he learned of Manikawan's death, none knew. He listened in stoical silence while Bob related to him in detail the circumstances of her going and the subsequent happenings in the lodge and in the camp at the Great Lake; but throughout the recital Mookoomahn made no comments, and his countenance betrayed nothing of his sensations.
Mookoomahn was recovering rapidly. He was passing, indeed, quite beyond Bill Campbell's control; and not satisfied now with the limited portions of food which Bill, religiously adhering to the advice he had received from Dick Blake and Ed Matheson, doled out to him, he had the day before the return of the travellers stolen away to the willows along the river bank below the tilt, killed some ptarmigans on his own account, and gorged himself upon the flesh to his temporary satisfaction; but nature balanced her account with him in the hours of subsequent agony which he suffered for his indiscretion.