Indian or some other lingo. He only
realized that Hank's presence, thrust thus between them, was
welcome--uncommonly welcome. Dr. Cathcart, though more calmly and
leisurely, advanced behind him, heavily stumbling.

Simpson seems hazy as to what was actually said and done in those next
few seconds, for the eyes of that detestable and blasted visage peering
at such close quarters into his own utterly bewildered his senses at
first. He merely stood still. He said nothing. He had not the trained
will of the older men that forced them into action in defiance of all
emotional stress. He watched them moving as behind a glass that half
destroyed their reality; it was dreamlike; perverted. Yet, through the
torrent of Hank's meaningless phrases, he remembers hearing his uncle's
tone of authority--hard and forced--saying several things about food and
warmth, blankets, whisky and the rest ... and, further, that whiffs of
that penetrating, unaccustomed odor, vile yet sweetly bewildering,
assailed his nostrils during all that followed.

It was no less a person than himself, however--less experienced and
adroit than the others though he was--who gave instinctive utterance to
the sentence that brought a measure of relief into the ghastly situation
by expressing the doubt and thought in each one's heart.

"It _is_--YOU, isn't it, Defago?" he asked under his breath, horror
breaking his speech.

And at once Cathcart burst out with the loud answer before the other had
time to move his lips. "Of course it is! Of course it is! Only--can't
you see--he's nearly dead with exhaustion, cold and terror! Isn't _that_
enough to change a man beyond all recognition?" It was said in order to
convince himself as much as to convince the others. The overemphasis
alone proved that. And continually, while he spoke and acted, he held a
handkerchief to his nose. That odor pervaded the whole camp.

For the "Defago" who sat huddled by the big fire, wrapped in blankets,
drinking hot whisky and holding food in wasted hands, was no more like
the guide they had last seen alive than the picture of a man of sixty is
like a daguerreotype of his early youth in the costume of another
generation. Nothing really can describe that ghastly caricature, that
parody, masquerading there in the firelight as Defago. From the ruins of
the dark and awful memories he still retains, Simpson declares that the
face was more animal than human, the features drawn about into wrong
p