His words sounded a knell in David's heart. If he had hoped that Father Roland would, at the very last, tell him something more about Tavish, that hope was now gone. The Missioner spoke in a voice that was almost gentle, and he came to David and put a hand on his shoulder as a father might have done with a son. He had placed himself, in this moment, beyond the reach of any questions that might have been in David's mind. With eyes and touch that spoke a deep affection he had raised a barrier between them as inviolable as that law of his creed which he had just mentioned. And with it had come a better understanding.
David was glad that Mukoki's voice and the commotion of the dogs came to interrupt them. They gathered up hurriedly the few things they had brought into the cabin and carried them to the sledge. David did not enter the cabin again but stood with the dogs in the edge of the timber, while Father Roland made his promised visit to the grave. Mukoki followed him, and as the Missioner stood over the dark mound in the snow, David saw the Cree slip like a shadow into the cabin, where a light was still burning. Then he noticed that Father Roland was kneeling, and a moment later the Indian came out of the cabin quietly, and without looking back joined him near the dogs. They waited.
Over Tavish's grave Father Roland's lips were moving, and out of his mouth strange words came in a low and unemotional voice that was not much above a whisper:
"... and I thank God that you did not tell me before you died, Tavish," he was saying. "I thank God for that. For if you had—I would have killed you!"
As he came back to them David noticed a flickering of light in the cabin, as though the lamp was sputtering and about to go out. They put on their snow shoes, and with Mukoki breaking the trail buried themselves in the moonlit forest.
Half an hour later they halted on the summit of a second ridge. The Cree looked back and pointed with an exultant cry. Where the cabin had been a red flare of flame was rising above the tree tops. David understood what the flickering light in the cabin had meant. Mukoki had spilled Tavish's kerosene and had touched a match to it so that the little devils might follow their master into the black abyss. He almost fancied he could hear the agonized squeaking of Tavish's pets.
Straight northward, through the white moonlight of that night, Mukoki broke their trail, travelling at times so swiftly that the Missioner commanded him to slacken his pace on David's account. Even David did not think of stopping. He had no desire to stop so long as their way was lighted ahead of them. It seemed to him that the world was becoming brighter and the forest gloom less cheerless as they dropped that evil valley of Tavish's farther and farther behind them. Then the moon began to fade, like a great lamp that had burned itself out of oil, and darkness swept over them like huge wings. It was two o'clock when they camped and built a fire.
So, day after day, they continued into the North. At the end of his tenth day—the sixth after leaving Tavish's—David felt that he was no longer a stranger in the country of the big snows. He did not say as much to Father Roland, for to express such a thought to one who had lived there all his life seemed to him to be little less than a bit of sheer imbecility. Ten days! That was all, and yet they might have been ten months, or as many years for that matter, so completely had they changed him. He was not thinking of himself physically—not a day passed that Father Roland did not point out some fresh triumph for him there. His limbs were nearly as tireless as the Missioner's; he knew that he was growing heavier; and he could at last chop through a tree without winding himself. These things his companions could see. His appetite was voracious. His eyes were keen and his hands steady, so that he was doing splendid practice shooting with both rifle and pistol, and each day when the Missioner insisted on their bout with the gloves he found it more and more difficult to hold himself in. "Not so hard, David," Father Roland frequently cautioned him, and in place of the first joyous grin there was always a look of settled anxiety in Mukoki's face as he watched them. The more David pummelled him, the greater was the Little Missioner's triumph. "I told you what this north country could do for you," was his exultant slogan; "I told you!"
Once David was on the point of telling him that he could see only the tenth part of what it had done for him, but the old shame held his tongue. He did not want to bring up the old story. The fact that it had existed, and had written itself out in human passion, remained with him still as a personal and humiliating degradation. It was like a scar on his own body, a repulsive sore which he wished to keep out of sight, even from the eyes of the man who had been his salvation. The growth of this revulsion within him had kept pace with his physical improvement, and if at the end of these ten days Father Roland had spoken of the woman who had betrayed him—the woman who had been his wife—he would have turned the key on that subject as decisively as the Missioner had banned further conversation or conjecture about Tavish. This was, perhaps, the best evidence that he had cut out the cancer in his breast. The Golden Goddess, whom he had thought an angel, he now saw stripped of her glory. If she had repented in that room, if she had betrayed fear even, a single emotion of mental agony, he would not have felt so sure of himself. But she had laughed. She was, like Tavish, a devil. He thought of her beauty now as that of a poisonous flower. He had unwittingly touched such a flower once, a flower of wonderful waxen loveliness, and it had produced a pustular eruption on his hand. She was like that. Poisonous. Treacherous. A creature with as little soul as that flower had perfume. It was this change in him, in his conception and his memory of her, that he would have given much to have Father Roland understand.