Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 27, 2025
"Guess he was a little crazy," Brokaw had said, speaking of Tavish as he had last known him on the Firepan. Crazy! Going mad! And at last he had killed himself. Was it possible that a man of Tavish's sort could be haunted for so long by spectres of the past? It seemed unreasonable.
For a long time David and the Missioner sat smoking their pipes, waiting for Tavish. Father Roland was puzzled and yet he was assured. He was puzzled because Tavish's snow shoes hung on their wooden peg in one of the cross logs and his rifle was in its rack over the bunk. "I didn't know he had another pair of snow shoes," he said. "Still, it is quite a time since I have seen him a number of weeks.
Throw out Tavish's blankets and put your own in his bunk. I prefer the floor. Always did. Nothing like a good, smooth floor...." He was interrupted by the opening of the cabin door. The Cree thrust in his head and shoulders. He came no farther. His eyes were afire with the smouldering gleam of garnets.
"Of course I knew the account would be greatly exaggerated;" and he made light of the whole affair, knowing that the facts would still be capable of shocking her, giving a comic picture of the Major's seafaring qualities, and Carmen's and Miss Tavish's chaff of the gallant old beau.
His face was ghastly, and terrible almost as terrible as Tavish's, and he seemed to be struggling with something in his throat before he could speak. Then he said, in a strange, forced voice that David had never heard come from his lips before: "Bury him. There will be no prayer." He turned away, moving slowly in the direction of the forest.
Then he fastened the cabin door with a wooden bolt and sat himself down at the table, with the lamp close to his bent head and Tavish's confession in his hands.
"Tavish's pets," he chuckled. "He says they're company. I've seen a dozen of them on his shoulders at one time. Queer. Queer." His hands made the rasping sound as he rubbed them. Suddenly he lifted a lid from the stove and peered into the fire-box. "He put fuel in here less than an hour ago," he said. "Wonder where he can be mouching at this hour. The dogs are gone." He scanned the table.
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.
He had gone a hundred yards or more into the forest, and in a little open space, lighted up like a tiny amphitheatre in the glow of the moon, he stopped. Suddenly there came to him, thrilling in its promise, a key to the situation. He would wait until they reached Tavish's. And then, in the presence of the Missioner, he would suddenly show Tavish the picture.
The next day, as the swift-thickening gloom of northern night was descending about them again, the Missioner halted his team on the crest of a boulder-strewn ridge, and pointing down into the murky plain at their feet he said, with the satisfaction of one who has come to a journey's end: "There is Tavish's." They went down into the plain.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking