The prisoner made no reply. It was the final blow. Kars had withheld it till the psychological moment. He had withheld it, not with any thought of mercy, but with a crude desire to punish when the hurt would be the greatest.
He had achieved more than he knew. Buoyed with the belief that his earlier crime on Bell River had been so skilfully contrived that no court of law could ever hope to convict him of a capital offence, Murray McTavish had only endured the suspense and haunting fear of uncertainty. Now he realized to the full the disaster that had overtaken him. He was stunned by the blow that had fallen.
The cooked meat that was passed to him by the Indian was left untouched. The dark night journey passed before his wide, unsleeping eyes as the canoes sped on towards the Fort. The last hope had been torn from him. A dreadful waking nightmare pursued him. It was the complete wrecking of a strong mentality, the shattering of an iron nerve under a sledge-hammer blow that had been timed to the moment. He might walk to the scaffold with a step that was outwardly firm. But it would be merely the physical effort of a man in whom all hope is dead.
So the Fort landing was reached and passed. Kars alone disembarked, his canoe remaining ready to overhaul his companions at their next night camp. He was going to tell his story to those who must learn the truth. It was a mission from which he shrank, but he knew that his lips alone must tell it. He hoped and believed it was the final act of the drama these cruelly injured people must be forced to witness. Then the gloomy curtain would be dropped, but to rise again on scenes of sunlight and happiness.
CHAPTER XXXII
THE SUMMER OF LIFE
The passage of time for John Kars had never been so swift, so feverish in the rush of poignant events. Four months had passed since he had landed like a shadow in the night on the banks of Snake River, to tell the story of men's evil to those to whom he would gladly have imparted only happy tidings.
Now he was at the landing again, with pages of tragic history turned in his book of life. But they were turned completely, and only the memory of them was left behind. The other pages, those remaining to be perused, were different. They contained all those things without which no life could ever be counted complete. That happiness which all must seek, and the strong and wise will cling to, and only the weak and foolish will make a plaything of.
It was the crowning day of his life, and he desired to live every moment of it. So he had left his bed under the hospitable roof of Father José to witness the first moment of its birth.