remembered distinctly those last words which Strangeways
had spoken, even as though he were now repeating them again aloud, "I
tell you if the ice were as rotten as your soul or Spurling's, I would
still follow him, though I had to follow him to Hell." And his last
utterance had been a reiteration of that promise, "He killed the woman
I loved, and he shall pay the price though I follow him to Hell."

This was the fulfilment of that promise; though he himself was dead,
he had delayed his body near Murder Point that, with his pale and
silent lips and the portrait which hung about his neck, he might urge
his rival on in their common cause of vengeance. "I will pray God
every day of my life that Spurling may be damned throughout the
ages--eternally and pitilessly damned," he had said, and now that the
days of his life were over his body had tarried behind to continue
that errand, so far as was possible, into the days of his death. When
they had parted that night, a month ago outside the shack, he had told
a lie; he had denied that the woman was Mordaunt who had been
murdered, and had tried to prove his words by asserting that the body
which was found in the creek near Forty-Mile had worn a woman's dress.
Now he had come back to silently refute his own statement, and to
declare the truth which would stir up anger and give him an inheritor
of his revenge.

Here, then, was a new reason why he should become ardent in the
pursuit and effect the capture of Spurling, that by so doing he would
be behaving honourably by a man who was dead. He saw in it at present,
with his cynic's eye for self-scorn and self-depreciation, only an
added excuse and more subtle temptation for the saving of himself.
"No, I cannot do it," he said. And yet, somewhere at the back of his
brain, the monotonous and oracular voice of a wise self-knowledge kept
answering, "But you will do it, when you have had leisure to be
lonely, and have tortured yourself with memories of her."

It seemed to Granger as though Strangeways himself were the speaker of
those words; but when he turned round hotly, prepared for argument, he
found that the eyes had become glazed and vacant, and that at last the
body was truly dead. It had no need to live longer--it had delivered
its message.

CHAPTER XI

THE LOVE OF WOMAN

It was past noon before they had completed Strangeways' burial at the
bend. When they had finished, the skies had cleared themselves of
storm an