“Let us hope he’ll be there, and let us hope he’s innocent,” said Doctor Joe.

Some day and in some way every sin is punished and every criminal is discovered.  It is an immutable law of God that he who does wrong must atone for the wrong.  We do not always know how the punishment is brought about, but the guilty one knows.  And so with the shooting and robbery of Lem Horn.  Many months were to pass before the mystery was to be solved, and then the revelation was to come in a startling manner in the course of an adventure amid the deep snows of winter.

Thomas sailed away the following morning.  They watched his boat pass down through The Jug and out into the Bay, and then the silence of the wilderness closed upon him, and no word came as to whether or no Indian Jake met him at the Nascaupee River camp.

CHAPTER XI

THE LETTER IN THE CAIRN

In Labrador September is the pleasantest month of the year.  It is a period of calm when fogs and mists and cold dreary rains, so frequent during July and the early half of August, are past, and Nature holds her breath before launching upon the world the bitter blasts and blizzards and awful cold of a sub-arctic winter.  There are days and days together when the azure of the sky remains unmarred by clouds, and the sun shines uninterruptedly.  The air, brilliantly transparent, carries a twang of frost.  Evening is bathed in an effulgence of colour.  The sky flames in startling reds and yellows blending into opals and turquoise, with the shadowy hills lying in a purple haze in the west.

Then comes night and the aurora.  Wavering fingers of light steal up from the northern horizon.  Higher and higher they climb until they have reached and crossed the zenith.  From the north they spread to the east and to the west until the whole sky is aflame with shimmering fire of marvellous changing colours varying from darkest purple to dazzling white.

The dark green of the spruce and balsam forests is splotched with golden yellow where the magic touch of the frost king has laid his fingers and worked a miracle upon groves of tamaracks.  The leaves of the aspen and white birch have fallen, and the flowers have faded.

Spruce grouse chickens, full grown now, rise in coveys with much noise of wing, and perch in trees looking down unafraid upon any who intrude upon their forest home.  Ptarmigans, still in their coat of mottled brown and white, gather in flocks upon the naked hills to feed, where upland cranberries cover the ground in red masses; or on the edge of marshes where bake apple berries have changed from brilliant red to delicate salmon pink and offer a sweet and wholesome feast.

The honk and quack of wild geese and ducks, southward bound in great flocks, disturbs the silence of every inlet and cove and bight, where the wild fowl pause for a time to rest and feed upon the grasses.