Somehow, the brier would not draw, and McTavish impatiently unscrewed the stem from the bowl to investigate. In the small cavity thus exposed, he saw an obstruction which, when dug out with a pin, proved to be a sheet of thin paper, very carefully rolled.
Straightening it out, Donald saw pencil-marks in strange triangles. There were V's and U's placed in any of four positions, and queer symbols that resembled the "pot-hooks" of shorthand more than anything else.
For a moment, he stared perplexed, and then memory returned to him. This was, indeed, a message from Peter Rainy, and written In the only language the old Indian could use--the Cree symbols into which the Bible had been translated by the zealous missionary, James Evans, back in the fifties. On long winter nights at Fort Dickey, Peter Rainy had taught his superior to read and write in this obsolete fashion.
Now, Donald bent to the work. The first words came hard, but, before he had finished the paper, he was reading easily. And this, freely translated, is what he saw:
I will be a mile in the woods, along the old beaver trail, from the fifth night after Miss Jean's departure until the tenth. If you do not come by then I will go back to Fort Dickey and return for you when your month is up. There is work for you to do. I have a clew as to Miss Jean, but you must act at once if you expect to save her. I have sawed the bars of your window almost through at the bottom. When in the woods call me with the cry of an owl.
And, having read, Donald McTavish mechanically lighted his pipe, and began to smoke furiously.
It was the old battle between love and duty. The pile of covered newspapers lay unheeded beside the young man's chair. He pictured Jean Fitzpatrick in every conceivable peril of the winter on those desolate barrens--as the prisoner of Indians, of trappers, as the prey of wild beasts, as the prey of men. He writhed at his impotence, and cursed the day that had seen his rescue on Death Trail. Better a skeleton without flesh, he thought, than a living being whose every thought tortured him to desperation.
And, yet, there was something in the idea of escape that seemed shameful to him. If he had done wrong, he must take his medicine; if he had failed, he must atone for the failure according to the decrees of his superior. That was the discipline in him responding to the discipline of Fitzpatrick. It was the iron McTavish to the fore rather than the passionate flesh-and-blood McTavish.