and carried it in his hand.  He went into dark corners, scrutinized the floor as well as the walls, and moved garments from their wooden pegs.  There was nothing.  Tavish had cheated him again!  His eyes rested finally on the chest.  He placed the lamp on a stool, and tried the lid.  It was unlocked.  As he lifted it he heard voices indistinctly outside.  Father Roland had returned with Mukoki.  He could hear them as they went to where Tavish was lying with his face turned up to the moon.

On his knees he began pawing over the stuff in the chest.  It was a third filled with odds and ends—­little else but trash; tangled ends of babiche, a few rusted tools, nails and bolts, a pair of half-worn shoe packs—­a mere litter of disappointing rubbish.  The door opened behind him as he was rising to his feet.  He turned to face Mukoki and the Missioner.

“There is nothing,” he said, with a gesture that took in the room.  “He hasn’t left any word that I can find.”

Father Roland had not closed the door.

“Mukoki will help you search.  Look in his clothing on the wall.  Tavish must surely have left—­something.”

He went out, shutting the door behind him.  For a moment he listened to make sure that David was not going to follow him.  He hurried then to the body of Tavish, and stripped off the blanket.  The dead man was terrible to look at, with his open glassy eyes and his distorted face, and the moonlight gleaming on his grinning teeth.  The Missioner shuddered.

“I can’t guess,” he whispered, as if speaking to Tavish.  “I can’t guess—­quite—­what made you do it, Tavish.  But you haven’t died without telling me.  I know it.  It’s there—­in your pocket.”

He listened again, and his lips moved.  He bent over him, on one knee, and averted his eyes as he searched the pockets of Tavish’s heavy coat.  Against the dead man’s breast he found it, neatly folded, about the size of foolscap paper—­several pages of it, he judged, by the thickness of the packet.  It was tied with fine threads of babiche, and in the moonlight he could make out quite distinctly the words, “For Father Roland, God’s Lake—­Personal.”  Tavish, after all, had not made himself the victim of sudden fright, of a momentary madness.  He had planned the affair in a quite business-like way.  Premeditated it with considerable precision, in fact, and yet in the end he had died with that stare of horror and madness in his face.  Father Roland spread the blanket over him again after he had placed the packet in his own coat.  He knew where Tavish’s pick and shovel were hanging at the back of the cabin and he brought these tools and placed them beside the body.  After that he rejoined David and the Cree.

They were still searching, and finding nothing.

“I have been looking through his clothes—­out there,” said the Missioner, with a shuddering gesture which intimated that his task had been as fruitless as their own.  “We may as well bury him.  A shallow grave, close to where his body lies.  I have placed a pick and a shovel on the spot.”  He spoke to David:  “Would you mind helping Mukoki to dig?  I would like to be alone for a little while.  You understand.  There are things....”