Father Roland had not closed the door.
"Mukoki will help you search. Look in his clothing on the wall. Tavish must surely have left—something."
He went out, shutting the door behind him. For a moment he listened to make sure that David was not going to follow him. He hurried then to the body of Tavish, and stripped off the blanket. The dead man was terrible to look at, with his open glassy eyes and his distorted face, and the moonlight gleaming on his grinning teeth. The Missioner shuddered.
"I can't guess," he whispered, as if speaking to Tavish. "I can't guess—quite—what made you do it, Tavish. But you haven't died without telling me. I know it. It's there—in your pocket."
He listened again, and his lips moved. He bent over him, on one knee, and averted his eyes as he searched the pockets of Tavish's heavy coat. Against the dead man's breast he found it, neatly folded, about the size of foolscap paper—several pages of it, he judged, by the thickness of the packet. It was tied with fine threads of babiche, and in the moonlight he could make out quite distinctly the words, "For Father Roland, God's Lake—Personal." Tavish, after all, had not made himself the victim of sudden fright, of a momentary madness. He had planned the affair in a quite business-like way. Premeditated it with considerable precision, in fact, and yet in the end he had died with that stare of horror and madness in his face. Father Roland spread the blanket over him again after he had placed the packet in his own coat. He knew where Tavish's pick and shovel were hanging at the back of the cabin and he brought these tools and placed them beside the body. After that he rejoined David and the Cree.
They were still searching, and finding nothing.
"I have been looking through his clothes—out there," said the Missioner, with a shuddering gesture which intimated that his task had been as fruitless as their own. "We may as well bury him. A shallow grave, close to where his body lies. I have placed a pick and a shovel on the spot." He spoke to David: "Would you mind helping Mukoki to dig? I would like to be alone for a little while. You understand. There are things...."
"I understand, Father."
For the first time David felt something of the awe of this thing that was death. He had forgotten, almost, that Father Roland was a servant of God, so vitally human had he found him, so unlike all other men of his calling he had ever known. But it was impressed upon him now, as he followed Mukoki. Father Roland wanted to be alone. Perhaps to pray. To ask mercy for Tavish's soul. To plead for its guidance into the Great Unknown. The thought quieted his own emotions, and as he began to dig in the hard snow and frozen earth he tried to think of Tavish as a man, and not as a monster.
In the cabin Father Roland waited until he heard the beat of the pick before he moved. Then he fastened the cabin door with a wooden bolt and sat himself down at the table, with the lamp close to his bent head and Tavish's confession in his hands. He cut the babiche threads with his knife, unfolded the sheets of paper and began to read, while Tavish's mice nosed slyly out of their murky corners wondering at the new and sudden stillness in the cabin and, it may be, stirred into restlessness by the absence of their master.