Father Roland still did not answer.  He was getting into his clothes mechanically, his face curiously ashen, his eyes neither horrified nor startled, but with a stunned look in them.  He did not speak when he went to the door and out into the night.  David followed, and in a moment they stood close to the thing that was hanging where Tavish’s meat should have been.  The moon threw a vivid sort of spotlight on it.  It was grotesque and horrible—­very bad to look at, and unforgettable.  Tavish had not died easily.  He seemed to shriek that fact at them as he swung there dead; even now he seemed more terrified than cold.  His teeth gleamed a little.  That, perhaps, was the worst of it all.  And his hands were clenched tight.  David noticed that.  Nothing seemed relaxed about him.

Not until he had looked at Tavish for perhaps sixty full seconds did Father Roland speak.  He had recovered himself, judging from his voice.  It was quiet and unexcited.  But in his first words, unemotional as they were, there was a significance that was almost frightening.

“At last!  She made him do that!”

He was speaking to himself, looking straight into Tavish’s agonized face.  A great shudder swept through David. She! He wanted to cry out.  He wanted to know.  But the Missioner now had his hands on the gruesome thing in the moonlight, and he was saying: 

“There is still warmth in his body.  He has not been long dead.  He hanged himself, I should say, not more than half an hour before we reached the cabin.  Give me a hand, David!”

With a mighty effort David pulled himself together.  After all, it was nothing more than a dead man hanging there.  But his hands were like ice as he seized hold of it.  A knife gleamed in the moonlight over Tavish’s head as the Missioner cut the rope.  They lowered Tavish to the snow, and David went into the cabin for a blanket.  Father Roland wrapped the blanket carefully about the body so that it would not freeze to the ground.  Then they entered the cabin.  The Missioner threw off his coat and built up the fire.  When he turned he seemed to notice for the first time the deathly pallor in David’s face.

“It shocked you—­when you found it there,” he said. “Ugh! I don’t wonder.  But I ...  David, I didn’t tell you I was expecting something like this.  I have feared for Tavish.  And to-night when the dogs and Mukoki signalled death I was alarmed—­until we found the fire in the stove.  It didn’t seem reasonable then.  I thought Tavish would return.  The dogs were gone, too.  He must have freed them just before he went out there.  Terrible!  But justice—­justice, I suppose.  God sometimes works His ends in queer ways, doesn’t He?”

“What do you mean?” cried David, again fighting that thickening in his throat.  “Tell me, Father!  I must know.  Why did he kill himself?”

His hand was clutching at his breast, where the picture lay.  He wanted to tear it out, in this moment, and demand of Father Roland whether this was the face—­the girl’s face—­that had haunted Tavish.