His head was held high.

He looked like a monarch.
And his voice was calm.
"Everything is there, Johnny--everything but the gold," he said.

"They took that." Now he spoke to Joanne.
"You better not go with us into the other cabins," he said.
"Why ?" she asked softly.
"Because--there's death in them all." "I am going," she said.
From the window of the largest cabin MacDonald pulled the sapling shutter, and, like the other, it fell at his feet.

Then they opened the door, and entered; and here the sunlight revealed the cabin's ghastly tragedy.

The first thing that they saw, because it was most terrible, was a rough table, half over which lay the shrunken thing that had once been a man.