From sunrise to sunset the winter had slowly thawed: the trees had uncovered their greens and browns, thrusting themselves forth from beneath the rain-washed greyness of the melting snow; the river, reluctantly at first, had cracked and swayed, and become engraved by miniature streams which ate their way, as acid on metal, across its surface. Strange messages those narrow streams of water wrote; strange they seemed at least to Granger as he watched them day by day. Sometimes they seemed to be writing words, and sometimes drawing faces. The words he could not always decipher; when he did they were mostly proper names, STRANGEWAYS, SPURLING, MORDAUNT, EL DORADO. The faces were more easy to recognise, and three of them corresponded to the first three names. There was one morning when he awoke, having dreamed of the horrible revenge which he would take, and going to the window was appalled to see a new face scrawled upon the ice--his own, yet not his own; the evil likeness to the self which had come to him in the Klondike. He was puzzled, and set to work to discover the reason for these signs. Then a verse which he had once learnt as a child came back to him, "Jesus stooped down and wrote with his finger on the ground, _as though he heard them not_. And _they which heard it_, being convicted by _their own_ conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last; and Jesus was left alone, _and the woman_."
So he knew that it was God's hand which had etched that warning likeness overnight, which his own conscience had discerned, accusing him. Also, in gazing upon that drawing he heard a voice, which was his own voice, used as a medium for another mind, saying, "Now that thou hast seen what thou art like, go out, that I may be left alone _and Spurling_." So Granger had agreed with God that day that he would cease from his dreams of human vengeance, and leave Him alone with Spurling. He did not dare to tell God all his thoughts, but he felt certain that, had Spurling's opinions been consulted, he would have preferred to be left alone with John Granger. It was terrible enough to have to dwell between God's footsteps, as all men must who live in Keewatin, when His eyes were averted, and He Himself walked by seemingly unconscious of your presence; but to have to live there when He had noticed your presence, and His face was lifted up, while His gaze was bent upon you, with no hope of escape, a fugitive from human justice, alone in an empty land with your own conscience and Him as your accuser, that was to protract the shamefaced confusion of the Last Judgment through every day of your life. Granger felt that in making that compact he had done his worst by Druce Spurling.