White-faced, Carter knelt beside him and put both his hands about his shoulders. "Until he brought me into this cabin twelve days ago I never believed in God," he said huskily. "But I do now, Peter. For twelve days your father was my father. I loved him. And I know, if he could have understood, that from the beginning he would have forgiven me—the man who hunted him to his death. If by any merciful chance you can do that, Peter—if you can find it in your heart to let him remain my father and you my brother——" One of his hands found Peter's, clasping it tightly, and the other crept to Donald's face, where it lay cold and lifeless on its pillow. "In God's name say you forgive me!" he whispered.
In answer Peter's fingers returned the pressure of Carter's hand and a sob broke on the man-hunter's lips.
After a moment of silence he said: "It was the terrible cold and exposure of that night in which he was hunting for you. It reached his lungs. Until yesterday I was not afraid. Then the change came—swiftly. He died this morning, Peter, in your arms, and the last word on his lips was your name—and Mona's."
A long time there was stillness in the cabin as the two men knelt beside their dead.
[CHAPTER XXII]
In the long days and weeks which followed Peter's return to the cabin and the death of his father a change which seemed to him a little short of a miracle came over the man-hunter. The pitiless Carter, the human ferret, whose years of duty had never been tempered with mercy or conscience, was gone, and in his place was a new Carter, dragging himself a little at a time out of the paths of tragedy and misery which he had followed for so long.
Through those years Peter knew that Carter had been a Nemesis and a destroyer. He had not known pity, but only the grim exultation of achievement. Women, love, the extenuation of circumstance, even motherhood in its most beautiful sacrifice, had not stayed his hand when once the law had set him like a hound upon the scent of his victim. He had broken men and women. He had opened doors of blackness and despair to a hundred human souls. Yet the law had been always at his back, urging him on and exulting in his triumphs; he had committed no crime, no sin, and the world had applauded his exploits when it heard of them, visioning him as a splendid part of that mighty mechanism of legal force which made peace and good will on earth possible among men. Yet Carter, in these strange days of his mental and spiritual transformation, knew differently.
He knew that he had served too well, and for that reason he hated himself, and called himself a fiend. It was now, after he had hunted Peter's father to his death, that his successes began to dig themselves out of their graves and reappear to him as haunting ghosts. And he prayed God to keep Peter, of all men, from hating him.