Granger turned slowly about, and commenced to make his way back to the Point. At first he spoke aloud to himself as a thought occurred. "I distrusted that yellow beast of Spurling's from the first." "Now at any rate Spurling is safe." "I haven't yet discovered whether Mordaunt is dead,"--and so on. Then he ceased to speak with his lips, and his thoughts were uttered in the silence of his brain. They had all to do with Strangeways.
He wondered what vision had been his, causing him to smile as he sank. Did he think of that girl, and that he was going to meet her? Or of the old home in England? Or of his school-days? Or was it the Thames he thought about--of Oxford with its many towers, and the cry of the coach along the tow-path as the eight swings homeward up-stream, in the grey of a winter afternoon, to the regular click of the rowlocks as the men pluck their blades from the water, feather and come forward for the next stroke, making ready to drive back their slides as one man with their legs? He was certain that whatever happened, and however he should go out of life, did God spare him a moment's consciousness, it would be the vision of Oxford with its domes and spires, its austere and romantic quiet, its echoing cloisters and passages, its rivers with their sedges of silver and of grey, which would float before his dying eyes,--or would he think of Christ? Had Christ been the vision which this man had seen?
Strange thoughts for Keewatin! But death is always strange.
Nearly a month had gone by since the night on which Strangeways died. Not that time mattered much to Granger, for, like the immortals, men in Keewatin have dispensed with time: they have accepted as true the lesson which philosophers have been striving to teach the world ever since the human intellect first commenced to philosophise--that there are no such ontological facts as Time and Space. Among the men of this vast northern territory the outward expression of religion is rare; they do not often speak, and then only of such interests as are superficial to their lives. Yet here, in their fine neglect of the two sternest of self-imposed, human limitations, the religious instinct is manifest. As it would be sacrilege to count God's breaths, were that possible, so to them it seems a kind of blasphemy to number the recurrence of their own small perceptions when the Divine Perceived seems so entirely unconscious of their very existence. Hence it happens that one does not often hear a traveller speak of having journeyed so many days or miles; his division is more casual, and embraces only his own immediate actions--he has travelled so many "sleeps," nothing more.