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Selincourt was expected in Keewatin. "If I am alive and well when the summer comes there will be no need for you to do anything; I shall be able to face the consequences of my own wrong-doing. But if not, I leave it to you to do the very best you can. You can't make up for all the man may have had to suffer, but at least you can tell him that I was sorry." Katherine shuddered.
She had unlearned in those few months all the conceits of self-respect which she had been taught in the school at Winnipeg, and had reverted to the ancient type from which she was sprung, the river Indian. Granger, as he watched her, guessed all this, for had not he himself been parted from his old traditions? and he had not known Keewatin till he was a grown man.
The momentary pain of dying is usually much less intense than the hours of cowardly suffering which men bring upon themselves by prevising the anguish of their last departure, so he told himself. So to-day he sat outside his store in the sunshine and smoked his pipe, the freest and silentest man in all Keewatin, and, he would have had himself believe, the most stably contented.
The man who was awake looked up, shaded his eyes, then rising to his feet came down to the water's edge and waved his hand. Granger recognised in him his friend Père Antoine, the gaunt old Jesuit of Keewatin. No one could remember, not even the Indians, at what time he had first come into the district; he seemed to have been there always and was of a great age.
What a mystery it was that across that expanse of space and years her letter should have drifted down to him, from London to Keewatin, carried over the last few yards of its journey in the breast of a man who was already dead. It made him feel less of an exile that a miracle like that could happen it was almost as though she herself had appealed to him from the hidden world.
On occasions certain of its Cree Indians and half-breed trappers had come to him stealthily, at dead of night, to see whether he would not offer them better terms for their season's catch of furs, or to inquire whether he would not give them liquor in exchange, the selling of which to an Indian in Keewatin is a punishable offence.
Granger knew what he meant that he was referring to Keewatin and to his sacrifice. He shook his head at him; he was not thinking of that. He was thinking of Spurling's shadow, made prisoner by its own hatred, chained behind the woman weeping in the shack, and of how he had cheated it of its pitiful revenge.
Ugly as the dialect was in itself and often as it had revolted him in former days, there was something hauntingly pathetic about it when combined with religion, and sung in Keewatin by that weakling voice; the London voice, shut up in the mildewed box, was an exile like himself.
No one seemed to notice their doings, and even they themselves, becoming infected with the quiet of their surroundings, gradually ceased from conversing, and, except for an occasional necessary question, did their work in silence. At last, when it had grown as dark as it ever is in June time in Keewatin, signalling to one another with their eyes, they agreed that it was time to set out.
There were thus three vast ice fields, one the Cordilleran, which lay upon the Cordilleras of British America; one the Keewatin, which flowed out from the province of Keewatin, west of Hudson Bay; and one the LABRADOR ice field, whose center of dispersion was on the highlands of the peninsula of Labrador.