about.
Once more he recalled how it was said that le Pere had been seen
walking in the wilderness, wearing the countenance of Jesus Christ. He
looked like that now. Granger, made conscious of his own premeditated
wrong-doing, shrank back before him. Yet the words which Pere Antoine
uttered were very simple: "I am an old man, and I knew what I was
saying," was all he said.

Granger rose to his feet. "I'm going out," he said. "I'll return in a
little while and give you my decision."

He passed out from the close stale air of the shack into the
starlight; he could be nearer God there. A low, leisurely wind was
journeying over the forest, crooning softly to itself as it went.
Dominant over all other sounds, as was ever the case at Murder Point,
the wash of the ongoing river was to be heard--even in winter, when
every other live thing had ceased to stir, it was not silent. But now,
in the early summer of the northern year, it laughed uproariously and
clapped its hands against the banks in its passage, as if the water
were calling to the land, "Good-bye, old fellow; you won't see me
again for many a century. It was the end of the ice age when last we
parted." To Granger the shouting of the river was for all the world
like that of a troop-ship departing for a distant country. "Farewell,
farewell," it cried. The sound of its going made him weary with a
sense of world-wideness; if he was left behind to-day, when once he
had joined himself to a daughter of that country, he would be forever
left behind. But he had come outside not to reargue his way over the
old ground, but to decide. To do that he must be alone, quite
solitary; and there, just outside the shack, he was all too conscious
of Pere Antoine's eyes.

Slowly he commenced to descend the Point toward the river-bank. As he
went, a new desire sprang up within him--to speak with Strangeways; if
possible to make a compact and extort some approving sign from that
dead man. Stepping into the canoe, he pushed off lightly and set out
for the bend. The nearer he drew, the sterner his face became; he was
thinking of what he should say, and one has to be careful in what he
says in speaking with a man who is dead. Soon he came in sight of the
flimsy little cross which they had raised, and saw the stones which
they had piled above the body, shining white and grey in the
moonlight; then with a twist of the paddle his canoe shot in toward
the bank and the prow grated on the ice. Gr