The wind moaned outside, and then rose to a shriek. He sprang up and looked wildly about him. It was the shriek of a damned soul! No, he had been dozing and it was only a dream, and he lay back trembling.
For a long while he could not go to sleep again. Fear had taken absolute and complete possession of him--the fear of the eternal damnation that the missionary had so vividly pictured. It was a picture that had been received at the time without being seen and through all these years had remained in his brain, covered and hidden. This day's work had suddenly and for the first time drawn aside the screen and left it bare before his eyes displaying to him every fearful minute outline. He was a murderer and he would be punished. There was no thought of repentance for sins committed--only fear of a fate that he shrunk from but which confronted him as a reality and a certainty--as great a certainty as his rising in the morning and so near at hand. He got up and looked out. The wind blew clouds of snow into his face. He could not see the tree that he knew was ten feet away. It was an awful night for a man to be out without shelter.
Micmac John lay down again and after a time the tired brain and body yielded to nature and he slept.
The instincts of the half-breed, keen even in slumber, felt rather than heard the diminishing of wind and snow as the storm subsided with the approach of morning, and he arose at once. The rest had quieted his nerves, and he was the stolid, revengeful Indian again. After a meagre breakfast of tea and jerked venison he took down the tent and lashed the things securely upon the toboggan and ere the first stars began to glimmer through the cloud rifts he was hurrying away in the stillness of the night.
When the sky finally cleared and the moon came out, cold and brilliant, there was something uncanny and weird in its light lying upon earth's white shroud rent here and there by long, dark shadows across the trail. There was an indefinable mystery in the atmosphere. Micmac John, accustomed as he was to the wilderness, felt an uneasiness in his soul, the reflex perhaps of the previous night's awakening, that he could not quite throw off--a sense of impending danger--of a calamity about to happen. The trees became mighty men ready to strike at him as he approached and behind every bush crouched a waiting enemy. His guilty conscience was at work. The little spirit that God had placed within his bosom, to tell him when he was doing wrong, was not quite dead.