VIII
Then at length the darkness, having thus laboriously conceived, broughtforth--a figure. It drew forward into the zone of uncertain light wherefire and shadows mingled, not ten feet away; then halted, staring atthem fixedly. The same instant it started forward again with thespasmodic motion as of a thing moved by wires, and coming up closer tothem, full into the glare of the fire, they perceived then that--it wasa man; and apparently that this man was--Defago.
Something like a skin of horror almost perceptibly drew down in thatmoment over every face, and three pairs of eyes shone through it asthough they saw across the frontiers of normal vision into the Unknown.
Defago advanced, his tread faltering and uncertain; he made his waystraight up to them as a group first, then turned sharply and peeredclose into the face of Simpson. The sound of a voice issued from hislips--
"Here I am, Boss Simpson. I heered someone calling me." It was a faint,dried up voice, made wheezy and breathless as by immense exertion. "I'mhavin' a reg'lar hellfire kind of a trip, I am." And he laughed,thrusting his head forward into the other's face.
But that laugh started the machinery of the group of waxwork figureswith the wax-white skins. Hank immediately sprang forward with a streamof oaths so farfetched that Simpson did not recognize them as English atall, but thought he had lapsed into Indian or some other lingo. He onlyrealized that Hank's presence, thrust thus between them, waswelcome--uncommonly welcome. Dr. Cathcart, though more calmly andleisurely, advanced behind him, heavily stumbling.
Simpson seems hazy as to what was actually said and done in those nextfew seconds, for the eyes of that detestable and blasted visage peeringat such close quarters into his own utterly bewildered his senses atfirst. He merely stood still. He said nothing. He had not the trainedwill of the older men that forced them into action in defiance of allemotional stress. He watched them moving as behind a glass that halfdestroyed their reality; it was dreamlike; perverted. Yet, through thetorrent of Hank's meaningless phrases, he remembers hearing his uncle'stone of authority--hard and forced--saying several things about food andwarmth, blankets, whisky and the rest ... and, further, that whiffs ofthat 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 andadroit than the others though he was--who gave instinctive utterance tothe sentence that brought a measure of relief into the ghastly situationby expressing the doubt and thought in each one's heart.
"It _is_--YOU, isn't it, Defago?" he asked under his breath, horrorbreaking his speech.
And at once Cathcart burst out with the loud answer before the other hadtime to move his lips. "Of course it is! Of course it is! Only--can'tyou 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 toconvince himself as much as to convince the others. The overemphasisalone proved that. And continually, while he spoke and acted, he held ahandkerchief 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 likethe guide they had last seen alive than the picture of a man of sixty islike a daguerreotype of his early youth in the costume of anothergeneration. Nothing really can describe that ghastly caricature, thatparody, masquerading there in the firelight as Defago. From the ruins ofthe dark and awful memories he still retains, Simpson declares that theface was more animal than human, the features drawn about into wrongproportions, the skin loose and hanging, as though he had been subjectedto extraordinary pressures and tensions. It made him think vaguely ofthose bladder faces blown up by the hawkers on Ludgate Hill, that changetheir expression as they swell, and as they collapse emit a faint andwailing imitation of a voice. Both face and voice suggested some suchabominable resemblance. But Cathcart long afterwards, seeking todescribe the indescribable, asserts that thus might have looked a faceand body that had been in air so rarified that, the weight of atmospherebeing removed, the entire structure threatened to fly asunder andbecome--_incoherent_....
It was Hank, though all distraught and shaking with a tearing volume ofemotion he could neither handle nor understand, who brought things to ahead without much ado. He went off to a little distance from the fire,apparently so that the light should not dazzle him too much, and shadinghis eyes for a moment with both hands, shouted in a loud voice that heldanger and affection dreadfully mingled:
"You ain't Defaygo! You ain't Defaygo at all! I don't give a--damn, butthat ain't you, my ole pal of twenty years!" He glared upon the huddledfigure as though he would destroy him with his eyes. "An' if it is I'llswab the floor of hell with a wad of cotton wool on a toothpick, s'helpme the good Gawd!" he added, with a violent fling of horror and disgust.
It was impossible to silence him. He stood there shouting like onepossessed, horrible to see, horrible to hear--_because it was thetruth_. He repeated himself in fifty different ways, each moreoutlandish than the last. The woods rang with echoes. At one time itlooked as if he meant to fling himself upon "the intruder," for his handcontinually jerked towards the long hunting knife in his belt.
But in the end he did nothing, and the whole tempest completed itselfvery shortly with tears. Hank's voice suddenly broke, he collapsed onthe ground, and Cathcart somehow or other persuaded him at last to gointo the tent and lie quiet. The remainder of the affair, indeed, waswitnessed by him from behind the canvas, his white and terrified facepeeping through the crack of the tent door flap.
Then Dr. Cathcart, closely followed by his nephew who so far had kepthis courage better than all of them, went up with a determined air andstood opposite to the figure of Defago huddled over the fire. He lookedhim squarely in the face and spoke. At first his voice was firm.
"Defago, tell us what's happened--just a little, so that we can knowhow best to help you?" he asked in a tone of authority, almost ofcommand. And at that point, it _was_ command. At once afterwards,however, it changed in quality, for the figure turned up to him a faceso piteous, so terrible and so little like humanity, that the doctorshrank back from him as from something spiritually unclean. Simpson,watching close behind him, says he got the impression of a mask that wason the verge of dropping off, and that underneath they would discoversomething black and diabolical, revealed in utter nakedness. "Out withit, man, out with it!" Cathcart cried, terror running neck and neck withentreaty. "None of us can stand this much longer ...!" It was the cry ofinstinct over reason.
And then "Defago," smiling _whitely_, answered in that thin and fadingvoice that already seemed passing over into a sound of quite anothercharacter--
"I seen that great Wendigo thing," he whispered, sniffing the air abouthim exactly like an animal. "I been with it too--"
Whether the poor devil would have said more, or whether Dr. Cathcartwould have continued the impossible cross examination cannot be known,for at that moment the voice of Hank was heard yelling at the top of hisvoice from behind the canvas that concealed all but his terrified eyes.Such a howling was never heard.
"His feet! Oh, Gawd, his feet! Look at his great changed--feet!"
Defago, shuffling where he sat, had moved in such a way that for thefirst time his legs were in full light and his feet were visible. YetSimpson had no time, himself, to see properly what Hank had seen. AndHank has never seen fit to tell. That same instant, with a leap likethat of a frightened tiger, Cathcart was upon him, bundling the folds ofblanket about his legs with such speed that the young student caughtlittle more than a passing glimpse of something dark and oddly massedwhere moccasined feet ought to have been, and saw even that but withuncertain vision.
Then, before the doctor had time to do more, or Simpson time to eventhink a question, much less ask it, Defago was standing upright in frontof them, balancing with pain and difficulty, and upon his shapeless andtwisted visage an expression so dark and so malicious that it was, inthe true
sense, monstrous.
"Now _you_ seen it too," he wheezed, "you seen my fiery, burning feet!And now--that is, unless you kin save me an' prevent--it's 'bout timefor--"
His piteous and beseeching voice was interrupted by a sound that waslike the roar of wind coming across the lake. The trees overhead shooktheir tangled branches. The blazing fire bent its flames as before ablast. And something swept with a terrific, rushing noise about thelittle camp and seemed to surround it entirely in a single moment oftime. Defago shook the clinging blankets from his body, turned towardsthe woods behind, and with the same stumbling motion that had broughthim--was gone: gone, before anyone could move muscle to prevent him,gone with an amazing, blundering swiftness that left no time to act. Thedarkness positively swallowed him; and less than a dozen seconds later,above the roar of the swaying trees and the shout of the sudden wind,all three men, watching and listening with stricken hearts, heard a crythat seemed to drop down upon them from a great height of sky anddistance--
"Oh, oh! This fiery height! Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet offire ...!" then died away, into untold space and silence.
Dr. Cathcart--suddenly master of himself, and therefore of theothers--was just able to seize Hank violently by the arm as he tried todash headlong into the Bush.
"But I want ter know,--you!" shrieked the guide. "I want ter see! Thatain't him at all, but some--devil that's shunted into his place ...!"
Somehow or other--he admits he never quite knew how he accomplishedit--he managed to keep him in the tent and pacify him. The doctor,apparently, had reached the stage where reaction had set in and allowedhis own innate force to conquer. Certainly he "managed" Hank admirably.It was his nephew, however, hitherto so wonderfully controlled, who gavehim most cause for anxiety, for the cumulative strain had now produced acondition of lachrymose hysteria which made it necessary to isolate himupon a bed of boughs and blankets as far removed from Hank as waspossible under the circumstances.
And there he lay, as the watches of that haunted night passed over thelonely camp, crying startled sentences, and fragments of sentences, intothe folds of his blanket. A quantity of gibberish about speed and heightand fire mingled oddly with biblical memories of the classroom. "Peoplewith broken faces all on fire are coming at a most awful, awful, pacetowards the camp!" he would moan one minute; and the next would sit upand stare into the woods, intently listening, and whisper, "How terriblein the wilderness are--are the feet of them that--" until his uncle cameacross to change the direction of his thoughts and comfort him.
The hysteria, fortunately, proved but temporary. Sleep cured him, justas it cured Hank.
Till the first signs of daylight came, soon after five o'clock, Dr.Cathcart kept his vigil. His face was the color of chalk, and there werestrange flushes beneath the eyes. An appalling terror of the soulbattled with his will all through those silent hours. These were some ofthe outer signs ...
At dawn he lit the fire himself, made breakfast, and woke the others,and by seven they were well on their way back to the home camp--threeperplexed and afflicted men, but each in his own way having reduced hisinner turmoil to a condition of more or less systematized order again.