am now
taking you."

By this time it was clear to me that I had to do with a case lying far
outside of the common routine of life; something subtle, abnormal, hard
to measure, in which a clear and careful estimate would be necessary. If
Keene was labouring under some strange delusion, some disorder of mind,
how could I estimate its nature or extent, without time and study,
perhaps without expert advice? To wait a little would be prudent,
for his sake as well as for the sake of others. If there was some
extraordinary, reality behind his mysterious hints, it would need
patience and skill to test it. I gave him the promise for which he
asked.

At once, as if relieved, he sprang up, and crying, "Come on, follow me!"
began to make his way up the bed of the brook. It was one of the wildest
walks that I have ever taken. He turned aside for no obstacles; swamps,
masses of interlacing alders, close-woven thickets of stiff young
spruces, chevaux-de-frise of dead trees where wind-falls had mowed down
the forest, walls of lichen-crusted rock, landslides where heaps of
broken stone were tumbled in ruinous confusion--through everything he
pushed forward. I could see, here and there, the track of his former
journeys: broken branches of witch-hazel and moose-wood, ferns trampled
down, a faint trail across some deeper bed of moss. At mid-day we rested
for a half-hour to eat lunch. But Keene would eat nothing, except a
little pellet of some dark green substance that he took from a flat
silver box in his pocket. He swallowed it hastily, and stooping his face
to the spring by which he had halted, drank long and eagerly.

"An Indian trick," said he, shaking the drops of water from his face.
"On a walk, food is a hindrance, a delay. But this tiny taste of bitter
gum is a tonic; it spurs the courage and doubles the strength--if you
are used to it. Otherwise I should not recommend you to try it. Faugh!
the flavour is vile."

He rinsed his mouth again with water, and stood up, calling me to come
on. The way, now tangled among the nameless peaks and ranges, bore
steadily southward, rising all the time, in spite of many brief downward
curves where a steep gorge must be crossed. Presently we came into a
hard-wood forest, open and easy to travel. Breasting a long slope, we
reached the summit of a broad, smoothly rounding ridge covered with a
dense growth of stunted spruce. The trees rose above our heads, about
twice the height of a man, and so