Then he fell to thinking other thoughts--of how strangely this knowledge had come to him, from all across the world, by the hand of a rejected lover who was dead. Had this been the secret which the corporal had waited to tell him, thrown up on the ice, lying silent and deserted throughout that month at the bend; had he been waiting only to say, "I hold the knowledge which you most desire in my clenched right hand. Here is her woman's likeness. I require it no longer, now that I am dead?" No, surely he had not delayed for that. Then suddenly he realised that this must mean that the woman herself was dead. He 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."