McTabb had written a dozen lines after that, but all of them were a water-stained and unintelligible blur.
Billy crushed the letter in his hand. The new inspector wondered what terrible news he had received as he walked out into the blinding chaos of the storm.
XXI
THE FIGHTING SPARK
For ten minutes Billy buried himself blindly in the storm. He scarcely knew which direction he took, but at last he found himself in the shelter of the forest, and he was whispering Isobel’s name over and over again to himself.
“Dead— dead—” he moaned. “She is dead— dead—”
And then there rushed upon him, crushing back his deeper grief, a thought of the baby Isobel. She was still with McTabb down on the Little Beaver. In the blur of the storm he read again what he could make out of Rookie’s letter. Something in that last paragraph struck him with a deadly fear. “God... that kid... You, don’t know how I got to love her, Billy,... give her up...”
What did it mean? What had McTabb told him in that part of the letter that was gone?
The reaction came as he put the letter back into his pocket. He walked swiftly back to the inspector’s office.
“I’m going down to the Little Beaver. I’m going to start to-day,” he said. “Who is there in Churchill that I can get to go with me?”