David was glad that Mukoki’s voice and the commotion of the dogs came to interrupt them.  They gathered up hurriedly the few things they had brought into the cabin and carried them to the sledge.  David did not enter the cabin again but stood with the dogs in the edge of the timber, while Father Roland made his promised visit to the grave.  Mukoki followed him, and as the Missioner stood over the dark mound in the snow, David saw the Cree slip like a shadow into the cabin, where a light was still burning.  Then he noticed that Father Roland was kneeling, and a moment later the Indian came out of the cabin quietly, and without looking back joined him near the dogs.  They waited.

Over Tavish’s grave Father Roland’s lips were moving, and out of his mouth strange words came in a low and unemotional voice that was not much above a whisper: 

“... and I thank God that you did not tell me before you died, Tavish,” he was saying.  “I thank God for that.  For if you had—­I would have killed you!”

As he came back to them David noticed a flickering of light in the cabin, as though the lamp was sputtering and about to go out.  They put on their snow shoes, and with Mukoki breaking the trail buried themselves in the moonlit forest.

Half an hour later they halted on the summit of a second ridge.  The Cree looked back and pointed with an exultant cry.  Where the cabin had been a red flare of flame was rising above the tree tops.  David understood what the flickering light in the cabin had meant.  Mukoki had spilled Tavish’s kerosene and had touched a match to it so that the little devils might follow their master into the black abyss.  He almost fancied he could hear the agonized squeaking of Tavish’s pets.

* * * * *

Straight northward, through the white moonlight of that night, Mukoki broke their trail, travelling at times so swiftly that the Missioner commanded him to slacken his pace on David’s account.  Even David did not think of stopping.  He had no desire to stop so long as their way was lighted ahead of them.  It seemed to him that the world was becoming brighter and the forest gloom less cheerless as they dropped that evil valley of Tavish’s farther and farther behind them.  Then the moon began to fade, like a great lamp that had burned itself out of oil, and darkness swept over them like huge wings.  It was two o’clock when they camped and built a fire.

So, day after day, they continued into the North.  At the end of his tenth day—­the sixth after leaving Tavish’s—­David felt that he was no longer a stranger in the country of the big snows.  He did not say as much to Father Roland, for to express such a thought to one who had lived there all his life seemed to him to be little less than a bit of sheer imbecility.  Ten days!  That was all, and yet they might have been ten months, or as many years for that matter, so completely had they changed him.  He was not thinking of himself