“Jake found that and gave it to me,” he said. “There’s enough left to show that it had finger-stalls, and there are none on the mittens we use in cold weather. The thing’s English, and with a little rubbing I expect you’ll find the maker’s name on that button. When the party went up it was warm weather, but we know there was sharp frost when Gladwyne came back. A buttoned glove doesn’t drop off one’s hand, and even if it had done so Gladwyne would have noticed and picked it up. It seems to me he took it off to open one of the provision bags and couldn’t find it afterward because he’d trodden it into the snow.”
Nasmyth could doubt no longer, and his face grew red.
“The hound!” he broke out. “He had a hand frost-bitten—one finger is different from the others yet.”
Lisle said nothing; he could understand and sympathize with what was going on in his companion’s mind and the latter was filled with bitterness and humiliation. A man of his own kind and station in life, one with whom he fished and shot, had broken faith with his starving comrade and with incredible cowardice had left him to perish. Even this was not the worst; though Nasmyth had always taken the personal courage of his friends for granted. He was not a clever man and he had his faults, but he shaped his life in accordance with a few simple but inflexible rules. It was difficult for him to understand how one could yield to a fit of craven fear; but there was a fact which made Gladwyne’s transgression still blacker.
“This thing hits hard,” he said at length. “The man should have gone back, if he had known it meant certain death.”
Lisle filled his pipe and smoked in silence for several minutes during which the eery cry of a loon rang about the camp. It roused Nasmyth to an outbreak of anger.
“I hate that unearthly noise!” he exclaimed vehemently. “The thing seems to be gloating; it’s indecent! When I think of that call it will bring back the long portage and this ghostly river! I wish I’d never made the journey, or that I could blot the whole thing out!”
“It can’t be done,” Lisle replied. “It’s too late. You have learned the truth of what has been done here—but the results will work themselves out. Neither you nor I can stop them; they have to be faced.”
“The pity of it is that the innocent must suffer; they’ve borne enough already.”
“There’s a point I don’t quite understand,” declared Lisle. “Whatever the Hudson Bay agent thought, he’d have kept it to himself if he’d been allowed—I’ve met him. It was Gladwyne who laid the whole blame on Vernon; he forced the agent to bear him out. Why should he have taken so much trouble? His own tale would have cleared him.”