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Updated: June 12, 2025
The priest's quick eye had taken in the lighted candles at the little shrine, even as he saw the painfully changed aspect of the man. "The wife and child, Bagot?" he asked, looking round. "Ah, the boy!" he added, and going toward the bed, continued, presently, in a low voice: "Dominique is ill?" Bagot nodded, and then answered: "A wild-cat and then fever, Father Corraine."
Father Corraine stood painfully staring at the figure for a moment, and then the words broke from him "Not dead not dead wonderful!" Then he stepped quickly to a table, took therefrom a pannikin of water, and kneeling, held it to the lips of the gasping figure of a woman, throwing his arm round the shoulder, and supporting the head on his breast. Again he spoke "Alive alive! Blessed be Heaven!"
I'll take the wrong of this now, sir, and such shame as there is in that falsehood on my shoulders. And she here and I, and this man too, I doubt not, will carry your sin as you call it to our graves, without shame." Father Corraine shook his head sadly, and made no reply, for his soul was heavy. He motioned them all to sit down.
"I forget a good many times, but I know one all right, for I said it when the bird was singing. It isn't one out of the book Father Corraine sent mother by Pretty Pierre; it's one she taught me out of her own head. P'r'aps I'd better say it." "P'r'aps, if you want to." The voice was husky.
"There is the law, and my conscience." "The law! the law!" and there was sharp satire in the half-breed's voice. "What has it done in the West? Think, 'mon pere! Do you not know a hundred cases where the law has dealt foully? There was more justice before we had law. Law " And he named over swiftly, scornfully, a score of names and incidents, to which Father Corraine listened intently.
The veins were beating like live cords in the man's throat and at his temples. "'Twas just the same as Father Corraine bein' here, when mother had Sunday, wasn't it?" The man made no reply; but a gloom drew down his forehead, and his lips doubled in as though he endured physical pain. He got to his feet and paced the floor.
No sooner was this done than Father Corraine entered the room, and seeing the outlaw, said "You have come here, Pierre?" And his face showed wonder and anxiety. "I have come, mon pere, for sanctuary." "For sanctuary! But, my son, if I vex not Heaven by calling you so, why" he saw Pierre stagger slightly. "But you are wounded."
"Pardon!... Pardon!" he faintly cried in apology, and put it to his mouth. Then he fell backwards in the arms of Soldier Joe, who wiped a moisture from the lifeless cheek as he laid the body on a bed. In a corner of the stained handkerchief they found the word, Blanche. Father Corraine stood with his chin in his hand and one arm supporting the other, thinking deeply.
When he married sweet Lucette Barbond his religion reached little farther than a belief in the Scarlet Hunter of the Kimash Hills and those voices that could be heard calling in the night, till their time of sleep be past, and they should rise and reconquer the north. Not even Father Corraine, whose ways were like those of his Master, could ever bring him to a more definite faith.
Presently a trooper stepped forward and said warmly, yet brusquely, as became his office: "Father Corraine, we meet again!" The priest's face was overswept by many expressions, in which marvel and trouble were uppermost, while joy was in less distinctness. "Surely," he said, "it is Shon McGann." "Shon McGann, and no other.
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