It had grown upon David that to see Tavish had become his one great mission in the North.  What adventure lay beyond that meeting he did not surmise.  All his thoughts had centred in the single desire to let Tavish look upon the picture.  To-night, after the Missioner had joined Mukoki in the silk tent buried warmly under the mass of cut balsam, he sat a little longer beside the fire, and asked himself questions which he had not thought of before.  He would see Tavish.  He would show him the picture.  And—­what then?  Would that be the end of it?  He felt, for a moment, uncomfortable.  Beyond Tavish there was a disturbing and unanswerable problem.  The Girl, if she still lived, was a thousand miles from where he was sitting at this moment; to reach her, with that distance of mountain and forest between them, would be like travelling to the end of the world.  It was the first time there had risen in his mind a definite thought of going to her—­if she were alive.  It startled him.  It was like a shock.  Go to her?  Why?  He drew forth the picture from his coat pocket and stared at the wonder-face of the Girl in the light of the blazing logs. Why? His heart trembled.  He lifted his eyes to the grayish film of smoke rising between him and the balsam-covered tent, and slowly he saw another face take form, framed in that wraith-like mist of smoke—­the face of a golden goddess, laughing at him, taunting him. Laughing—­laughing!...  He forced his gaze from it with a shudder.  Again he looked at the picture of the Girl in his hand. “She knows.  She understands.  She comforts me.” He whispered the words.  They were like a breath rising out of his soul.  He replaced the picture in his pocket, and for a moment held it close against his breast.

The next day, as the swift-thickening gloom of northern night was descending about them again, the Missioner halted his team on the crest of a boulder-strewn ridge, and pointing down into the murky plain at their feet he said, with the satisfaction of one who has come to a journey’s end: 

“There is Tavish’s.”

CHAPTER XI

They went down into the plain.  David strained his eyes, but he could see nothing where Father Roland had pointed except the purplish sea of forest growing black in the fading twilight.  Ahead of the team Mukoki picked his way slowly and cautiously among the snow-hidden rocks, and with the Missioner David flung his weight backward on the sledge to keep it from running upon the dogs.  It was a thick, wild place and it struck him that Tavish could not have chosen a spot of more sinister aspect in which to hide himself and his secret.  A terribly lonely place it was, and still as death as they went down into it.  They heard not even the howl of a dog, and surely Tavish had dogs.  He was on the point of speaking, of asking the Missioner why Tavish, haunted by fear, should bury himself in a place like this,