“Yes. Jock was mad enough when I began—clean gone. But, somehow, the game I was playing cured him. ‘Steady, Jock!’ I said. ‘Steady!’ for I saw him move. I levelled for the second bead of the halo. My finger was on the trigger. ‘My God, don’t shoot!’ he called. It startled me, my hand shook, the thing went off, and Jock had a bullet through his brain.
“... Then I waked up. Perhaps I had been mad myself—I don’t know. But my brain never seemed clearer than when I was playing that game. It was like a magnifying glass: and my eyes were so clear and strong that I could see the pores on their skin, and the drops of sweat breaking out on Jock’s forehead when he yelled.”
A low moan came from Lady Belward. Her face was drawn and pale, but her eyes were on Gaston with a deep fascination. Sir William whispered to her.
“No,” she said, “I will stay.”
Gaston saw the impression he had made.
“Well, I had to bury poor Jock all alone. I don’t think I should have minded it so much, if it hadn’t been for the faces of those other two crazy men. One of them sat still as death, his eyes following me with one long stare, and the other kept praying all the time—he’d been a lay preacher once before he backslided, and it came back on him now naturally. Now it would be from Revelation, now out of the Psalms, and again a swingeing exhortation for the Spirit to come down and convict me of sin. There was a lot of sanity in it too, for he kept saying at last: ‘O shut not up my soul with the sinners: nor my life with the bloodthirsty.’ I couldn’t stand it, with Jock dead there before me, so I gave him a heavy dose of paregoric out of the Company’s stores. Before he took it he raised his finger and said to me, with a beastly stare: ‘Thou art the man!’ But the paregoric put him to sleep....
“Then I gave the other something to eat, and dragged Jock out to bury him. I remembered then that he couldn’t be buried, for the ground was too hard and the ice too thick; so I got ropes, and, when he stiffened, slung him up into a big cedar tree, and then went up myself and arranged the branches about him comfortably. It seemed to me that Jock was a baby and I was his father. You couldn’t see any blood, and I fixed his hair so that it covered the hole in the forehead. I remember I kissed him on the cheek, and then said a prayer—one that I’d got out of my father’s prayer-book: ‘That it may please Thee to preserve all that travel by land or by water, all women labouring of child, all sick persons and young children; and to show Thy pity upon all prisoners and captives.’ Somehow I had got it into my head that Jock was going on a long journey, and that I was a prisoner and a captive.”
Gaston broke off, and added presently:
“Perhaps this is all too awful to hear, but it gives you an idea of what kind of things went to make me.” Lady Belward answered for both:
“Tell us all—everything.”