Conscience may be seared; may be ignored; may be trampled on, but it cannot be killed; it cannot even be weakened and is ever ready at the most unseasonable and unexpected times to start up, vigorous and faithful to the very end, with its emphatic “Don’t!” and “No!”
Dragging the body out of the camp, McKay returned to take his supper and reason the matter out with himself.
“I could not help myself,” he thought; “when I took up my gun I did not intend to kill the man.”
Conscience again reminded him of its “Don’t!”
“And would not every man in Rud Ruver justify me for firing first in self-defence?”
Conscience again said “No!”
Here the hunter uttered a savage oath, to which Conscience made no reply, for Conscience never speaks back or engages in disputation.
We need not attempt further to analyse the workings of sophistry in the brain of a murderer. Suffice it to say that when the man had finished his supper he had completely, though not satisfactorily, justified himself in his own eyes. There was, he felt, a disagreeable undercurrent of uneasiness; but this might have been the result of fear as to how the Canadian half-breeds and friends of the slain man would regard the matter in the event of its being found out.
There was reason for anxiety on this head, for poor Perrin was a great favourite among his comrades, while Cloudbrow was very much the reverse.
Having finished the supper which he had purchased at such a terrible price, the young man gathered his things together, packed the provisions on his back, put on his snow-shoes and left the scene of the murder.