I said:  “Is it vain to appeal to your reason when your heart is heavy?”

“Had I another chance,” he said, “I would lighten the load of sin I bear—­ the heavy load I bear with me into the unknown.”

“God gives us all our chance.”

“He gave me my last chance at Tioga Fort.  And I cursed it in my heart and put it aside.”

“One day you will return,”

“Never again, Loskiel....  I am no coward.  I dare face the wrath to come.  It is not that; but—­ I am sorry I did not spare when I might have been more generous....  The little thing was ignorant....  Doves mate like that....  And somewhere—­ somehow—­ I shall be required to answer for it all—­ shall be condemned to make amends....  I wonder how the dead make their amends?...  For me to burn in hell avails her nothing....  If she thought it she would weep uncomforted....  No; there is a justice.  But how it operates I shall never understand until it summons me to hear my sentence.”

“You will return and do what a contrite heart bids you to do,” I said.

“If that might be,” he said gently, “that would I do—­ for the child’s sake and for hers.”

“Good God!” I said under my breath.

“Did you not surmise it?”

“No.”

“Well, then, now you know how deeply I am damned....  God gave me a last chance.  There was a chaplain at the fort.”

“Kirkland.”

“Yes, Gann went forward....  But—­ God’s grace was not within me....  And to see her angered me—­ that and the blinding hurt I had when Lana left—­ heart-broken, wretched, still loving me, but consigning me to my duty....  So I denied her at the bridge....  And from that moment has my unseen pilot walked beside me, and I know he leads me swiftly to my end.”

I raised my troubled eyes and glanced toward my Indians.  They had stripped great squares of bark from half a dozen trees, and were busily painting upon them, in red and blue, insulting signs and symbols—­ a dead tree-cat, scalped, and full of arrows; a snake severed into sections; a Seneca tied to a post and a broken wampum belt at his feet.  And on every tree they had also painted the symbol of their own clans and nation—­ pointed stones and the stars of the Pleiades; a witch-wolf and an enchanted bear; a yellow moth alighted on a white cross; a night-hawk, perfectly recognizable, soaring high above a sun, setting, bisecting the line of the horizon.

Every scalp taken was duly enumerated and painted there, together with every captured weapon.  Such a gallery of art in the wilderness I had never before beheld.

Boyd’s riflemen sat around, cross-legged on the moss, watching the Indians at their labour—­ all except Murphy and Elerson, who, true to their habits, had each selected a tree to decorate, and were hard at work with their hunting knives on the bark.

On Murphy’s tree I read:  “To hell with Walter Butler.”

Elerson, who no doubt had scraped the outlines of this legend with his knife-point before Murphy carved it, had produced another message on his own tree, not a whit more complimentary:  “Dam Butler, Brant, Hiakotoo, and McDonald for bloody rogues and murtherin’ rascals all!”