“I mean that his fear drove him at last to kill himself,” said Father Roland in a slow, sure voice, as if carefully weighing his words before speaking them.  “I believe, now, that he terribly wronged some one, that his conscience was his fear, and that it haunted him by bringing up visions and voices until it drove him finally to pay his debt.  And up here conscience is mitoo aye chikoon—­the Little Brother of God.  That is all I know.  I wish Tavish had confided in me, I might have saved him.”

“Or—­punished,” breathed David.

“My business is not to punish.  If he had come to me, asking help for himself and mercy from his God, I could not have betrayed him.”

He was putting on his coat again.

“I am going after Mukoki,” he said.  “There is work to be done, and we may as well get through with it by moonlight.  I don’t suppose you feel like sleep?”

David shook his head.  He was calmer now, quite recovered from the first horror of his shock, when the door closed behind Father Roland.  In the thoughts that were swiftly readjusting themselves in his mind there was no very great sympathy for the man who had hanged himself.  In place of that sympathy the oppression of a thing that was greater than disappointment settled upon him heavily, driving from him his own personal dread of this night’s ghastly adventure, and adding to his suspense of the last forty-eight hours a hopelessness the poignancy of which was almost like that of a physical pain.  Tavish was dead, and in dying he had taken with him the secret for which David would have paid with all he was worth in this hour.  In his despair, as he stood there alone in the cabin, he muttered something to himself.  The desire possessed him to cry out aloud that Tavish had cheated him.  A strange kind of rage burned within him and he turned toward the door, with clenched hands, as if about to rush out and choke from the dead man’s throat what he wanted to know, and force his glazed and staring eyes to look for just one instant on the face of the girl in the picture.  In another moment his brain had cleared itself of that insane fire.  After all, would Tavish kill himself without leaving something behind?  Would there not be some kind of an explanation, written by Tavish before he took the final step?  A confession?  A letter to Father Roland?  Tavish knew that the Missioner would stop at his cabin on his return into the North.  Surely he would not kill himself without leaving some work for him—­at least a brief accounting for his act!

He began looking about the cabin again, swiftly and eagerly at first, for if Tavish had written anything he would beyond all doubt have placed the paper in some conspicuous place:  pinned it at the end of his bunk, or on the wall, or against the door.  They might have overlooked it, or possibly it had fallen to the floor.  To make his search surer David lowered the lamp from its bracket in the ceiling