With a startled cry, Raymond picked himself up. It was the body of a man sprawled across the road. He wrenched open his bag, and, whipping out his flashlight, turned it upon the other.
The man lay upon his back, motionless, inert; the white, ghastly face, blood-streaked, was twisted at a sharp angle to the body, disclosing a gaping wound in the head that extended from the temple back across the skull—and a yard away, mute testimony to its tragic work, lay the rotten limb of a tree, devoid of leaves, perhaps ten feet in length and of the thickness of one's two fists, its end jagged and splintered where it had snapped away from its parent trunk.
It was the priest—Father Aubert, the young curé of St. Marleau.
CHAPTER V—THE “MURDER”
RAYMOND stooped to the other's side. He called the man's name—there was no answer. He lifted the priest's head—it sagged limply back again. He felt quickly for the heart beat—there was no sign of life. And then Raymond stood up again.
It was the nature of the man that, the sudden shock of his discovery once over, he should be cool and unperturbed. His nerves were not easily put to rout under any circumstances, and a life in the Great North, where the raw edges were turned only too often, left him, if not calloused, at least composed and, in a philosophical way, unmoved at the sight before him.
“Tough luck—even for a priest!” he muttered, not irreverently. “The man's dead, right enough.”
He glanced around him, and his eyes fixed again on the glimmer of light through the trees. That was the tavern undoubtedly—old Mother Blondin's, the excommuniée. He shrugged his shoulders, and a grim smile flickered across his lips. She too had her quarrel with the church, but even so she would hardly refuse temporary sanctuary to a dead man. The priest couldn't be left here lying in the road, and if Mother Blondin's son was not too drunk to help carry the body to the house, it would solve the problem until word could be got to the village.