They went at it again, and this time David spared none of his caution, and offered no advice, and the Missioner no longer posed, but became suddenly as elusive and as agile as a cat.  David was amazed, but he wasted no breath to demand an explanation.  Father Roland was parrying his straight blows like an adept.  Three times in as many minutes he felt the sting of the Missioner’s glove in his face.  In straight-away boxing, without the finer tricks and artifice of the game, he was soon convinced that the forest man was almost his match.  Little by little he began to exert the cleverness of his training.  At the end of ten minutes Father Roland was sitting dazedly in the snow, and the grin had gone from Mukoki’s face.  He had succumbed to a trick—­a swift side step, a feint that had held in it an ambush, and the seat of the Little Missioner’s faculties had rocked.  But he was gurgling joyously when he rose to his feet, and with one arm he hugged David as they returned to the cabin.

“Only one other man has given me a jolt like that in many a year,” he boasted, a bit proudly.  “And that was Tavish.  Tavish is good.  He must have lived long among fighting men.  Perhaps that is why I think so kindly of him.  I love a fighting man if he fights honourably with either brain or brawn, even more than I despise a coward.”

“And yet this Tavish, you say, is pursued by a great fear.  Can he be so much of a fighting man, in the way you mean, and still live in terror of....”

“What?”

That single word broke from the Missioner like the sharp crack of a whip.

“Of what is he afraid?” he repeated.  “Can you tell me?  Can you guess more than I have guessed?  Is one a coward because he fears whispers that tremble in the air and sees a face in the darkness of night that is neither living nor dead?  Is he?”

For a long time after he had gone to bed David lay wide awake in the darkness, his mind working until it seemed to him that it was prisoned in an iron chamber from which it was making futile efforts to escape.  He could hear the steady breathing of Father Roland and Mukoki, who were asleep.  His own eyes he could close only by forced efforts to bring upon himself the unconsciousness of rest.  Tavish filled his mind—­Tavish and the girl—­and along with them the mysterious woman in the coach.  He struggled with himself.  He told himself how absurd it all was, how grotesquely his imagination was employing itself with him—­how incredible it was that Tavish and the girl in the picture should be associated in that terrible way that had occurred to him.  But he failed to convince himself.  He fell asleep at last, and his slumber was filled with fleeting visions.  When he awoke the cabin was filled with the glow of the lantern.  Father Roland and Mukoki were up, and a fire was crackling in the stove.