‘You may speak of it to me husband. I do not judge you as they do.’

He wrapped his hand round hers as she held the soft soothing herbs to his wounds. ‘Singing Tree.’

‘I am here.’

‘Before this is done, you will doubt me.’

She looked at him with a half-scolding, half-bewildered expression. ‘I will never doubt you my love. You must rest.’

And he closed his eyes. But there was no rest.

His thin hand shook as he held the bible. Turning the pages in the yellow light of the lamp, he mouthed the words he read, as though being spoken out loud would give them meaning. James Henderson was far from being comforted by their message. His mouth was reading for him, but for all he knew it could be a cheap novel he held in his cold pale fingers, so opaque was his mind with fear and turmoil.

A sudden gust of wind rattled the flimsy shutters of his cabin and he looked up with a start, making an involuntary noise of fright which shamed him. Nothing but the wind. He realized he was breathing too fast and he let the bible rest on the table, laid both palms flat on the wooden table and tried to calm himself.

What had he seen? In God’s name, what had he seen? It had been a man of reason, of learning, who had boarded that ship in Glasgow for Canada, strong in his faith and sure of his salvation in Christ. Now he sat in this miserable wooden refuge, believing that no walls, perhaps no Christ, could save him from the horror he had witnessed in that tunnel. He was huddled and broken. An outlaw running from his own logic.

Henderson took a deep breath through his nose and straightened his back. Not what he saw. What he thought he saw. He kept hold of that thought, clung to it like a log in a swollen river. Thought he saw. He stood up, walked to his small, hard bed and knelt before it to pray. A mouse he had been unaware of scampered for the safety of the wall lining-boards as the toes of his great boots scraped the dusty floor. He watched it go with dull eyes.

Of course the whole thing was illusion. The pungency of the Indians’ beliefs were affecting everyone. His imagination had been ignited even more passionately than the simple-minded men of his flock, through constant and intimate contact with Hunting Wolf. This is what he told himself, hearing the words in his head, pretending they were being spoken by his colleagues in his club in Edinburgh. They would smile over a brandy and explore with gusto the intricacies of the human mind until it was time to hail a cab and return home to their townhouses where they would be safe in their beds, secure that God’s universe was a place of order and sanity.