Henderson shook his head, and Hunting Wolf lifted a weary arm, pointing into the tunnel. The men lay only feet from its yawning mouth and Henderson did not need to turn to see what his exhausted companion was pointing at.

‘He is back in the mountain now. Waiting.’

The Scot made a down-turned arc with his thin lips, the action of a man trying not to cry. Hunting Wolf felt the thin body that held him heave and shake as Henderson controlled himself enough to speak.

‘They come, Hunting Wolf. The men.’

The Indian nodded. ‘No matter. It will be done soon.’

Henderson looked down on this handsome brown man, wrapped in the black coat he remembered so vividly buying from Laurie’s the Tailor on Edinburgh’s Hanover Street. Somehow, it was not ridiculous. Hunting Wolf was the reality. The grey-faced Aberdonian with whiskers, who had made and sold the coat with a tape measure around his neck and a superior glint in his eye, seemed like the dream now. Scotland was the dream. Henderson summoned his resolve and controlled the contortions that betrayed his fear.

‘I go in. Stop this.’

Hunting Wolf looked at him as he would at a slow child. A faint, but not unkind smile moved on his lips. ‘How, Henderson? How will you stop it?’

The curse of language. That disease from the tower of Babel that so cruelly separated these men was often unbearable to the Scot. How he longed to unburden his terrors, his anxieties, his plans and lunatic schemes to this man. But his grasp of Hunting Wolf’s tongue was so meagre that he knew he would sound only like a simple fool. How to tell him what had occupied his every waking thought since yesterday? The Catholics believed in it. He had seen them do it once. Of course he scorned their idolatry and detested the sumptuous and excessive theatre they called worship.

But the part of that theatre they called exorcism, that had started to occupy his thoughts ever since he had crafted the crucifix for Hunting Wolf’s son. He had held the wooden cross in his hands and felt something like power from it. The power perhaps, only of his own faith, briefly revisiting him after its desertion that always came with that thing that stalked him. But was it not simply the power of faith that Jesus used to drive out demons?

And this demon, this cunning, spiteful abomination, surely it could be driven before the same power that had cast out its brother imps.

Hunting Wolf had called him a white shaman. If it were true, then his medicine was the cross of Jesus Christ. The minister who had left Edinburgh would have blushed at the thought of descending to this peasant-like belief. Exorcism was, he had always believed, another tool of the misguided Church of Rome to subdue its ignorant followers and keep power by encouraging superstition.