But for some inexplicable reason this night the white half of his nature had been awakened and he found himself thinking of what it meant to die—­to cease to be, with the world going on and on afterwards just as though nothing had happened.  Then the teachings of a missionary whom he had heard preach in Nova Scotia came to him.  He remembered what had been said of eternal happiness or eternal torment—­that one or the other state awaited the soul of every one after death.  Then a great terror took possession of him.  If Bob Gray died, as he certainly must in this storm, he would be responsible for it, and his soul would be consigned to eternal torment—­the terrible torment to last forever and forever, depicted by the missionary.  He had committed many sins in his life, but they were of the past and forgotten.  This was of the present.  He could already, in his frenzied imagination see Dick Blake, the avenger.  Dick would shoot him.  That was certain—­and then—­eternal torment.

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.