There had been a night when it was Spurling's turn to keep guard, and he had slept. Granger had wakened with a nervous sense of peril. Through the open door of the hut he had seen the silver of the moonlight in the tree-tops across the river and had seen the outline of his companion stretched along the ground. As he watched, he had seen a shadow fall across the threshold, followed by a head. It was grey in colour, the ears were laid back, and the fangs were bared as if with hunger. But it was the eyes which had absorbed his attention. They were angry and reproachful; he had seen them before--they were the eyes of a man whose soul is dead. They recalled to him that night when Beorn had declared himself. That he recognised them, as he admitted to himself when daylight was come, may have been only fancy; but the impression which he had while he gazed on them was very real. Moreover, he saw distinctly the scar of the wound which Spurling had inflicted in his fight at the cache. Then the head had been withdrawn, and the hut had been darkened by a huge form which stood across the doorway. He had heard Spurling turn over on his side, rouse up and cry out.
The form had crouched and sprung, and the light shone in again. There was a sound of scuffling outside, followed by a thud. Leaping to his feet, dazed and bewildered, he had run out in time to see a timber-wolf of monstrous size, with Spurling's arm in its mouth, dragging him away into the forest. Careless of his own safety, he had gone after the animal, belabouring its head with the stock of his rifle, for he was afraid to shoot, lest he should wound his companion. It had dropped its prey and fled, bounding off into the dusk between the tree-trunks, leaving Spurling a little mauled but not much injured. This experience had served to prove to them that, however much they hated, they were still indispensable to each other's safety, and must hold together.
Granger, for his own peace of mind, had sought to find an explanation for this happening. If the beast was indeed Beorn's soul, then why was it exiled there, on the Forbidden River? Had Beorn killed the miners, in his underground fights on the Comstock, not out of righteous indignation, as he had stated, but only for the pleasure of destroying life and out of envious, disappointed avarice? Had he mocked God consciously in making Him responsible for those crimes, and in attributing to Him their inspiration? If these things were so, then this might have been his fitting punishment, that, when by his own wickedness he had made himself an outcast from the company of mankind, and had been compelled to banish himself, for the sake of his own preservation, to a land where nothing was of much value, money least of all, there he had discovered the gold in the profitless search of which he had made himself vile. The power over gladness, which it would have represented to another man, had been of no use to him now, for he had not dared to take it out of the district to where it would acquire its artificial worth; yet he had not dared to remain on the Forbidden River: for there was no food there. So his body and soul had parted company; his body going south to God's Voice, while his soul stayed near to the thing after which it had lusted, for which it had exchanged its happiness, to guard it, that it might not become the possession of a freer man and bring him the gladness which to a murderer is denied.