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A priest could not lie. Edwin Bentham had heard this often, and believed it.

‘Of course not, Father,’ he interposed hurriedly. ‘I was only wondering where my wife had gone, and thought maybe–I guess she’s up at Mrs. Stanton’s on French Gulch. Nice weather, isn’t it? Heard the news? Flour’s gone down to forty dollars a hundred, and they say the che-cha-quas are flocking down the river in droves.

‘But I must be going; so good-by.’ The door slammed, and from the window they watched him take his guest up French Gulch. A few weeks later, just after the June high-water, two men shot a canoe into mid-stream and made fast to a derelict pine. This tightened the painter and jerked the frail craft along as would a tow-boat. Father Roubeau had been directed to leave the Upper Country and return to his swarthy children at Minook. The white men had come among them, and they were devoting too little time to fishing, and too much to a certain deity whose transient habitat was in countless black bottles.

Malemute Kid also had business in the Lower Country, so they journeyed together.

But one, in all the Northland, knew the man Paul Roubeau, and that man was Malemute Kid. Before him alone did the priest cast off the sacerdotal garb and stand naked. And why not? These two men knew each other. Had they not shared the last morsel of fish, the last pinch of tobacco, the last and inmost thought, on the barren stretches of Bering Sea, in the heartbreaking mazes of the Great Delta, on the terrible winter journey from Point Barrow to the Porcupine? Father Roubeau puffed heavily at his trail-worn pipe, and gazed on the reddisked sun, poised somberly on the edge of the northern horizon.

Malemute Kid wound up his watch. It was midnight.

‘Cheer up, old man!’ The Kid was evidently gathering up a broken thread.

‘God surely will forgive such a lie. Let me give you the word of a man who strikes a true note: If She have spoken a word, remember thy lips are sealed, And the brand of the Dog is upon him by whom is the secret revealed.

If there be trouble to Herward, and a lie of the blackest can clear, Lie, while thy lips can move or a man is alive to hear.’

Father Roubeau removed his pipe and reflected. ‘The man speaks true, but my soul is not vexed with that. The lie and the penance stand with God; but–but–‘

‘What then? Your hands are clean.’ ‘Not so. Kid, I have thought much, and yet the thing remains. I knew, and made her go back.’ The clear note of a robin rang out from the wooden bank, a partridge drummed the call in the distance, a moose lunged noisily in the eddy; but the twain smoked on in silence.