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Page 20
It was Hank, though all distraught and shaking with a tearing volume of
emotion he could neither handle nor understand, who brought things to a
head 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 shading
his eyes for a moment with both hands, shouted in a loud voice that held
anger and affection dreadfully mingled:
"You ain't D�faygo! You ain't D�faygo at all! I don't give a--damn, but
that ain't you, my ole pal of twenty years!" He glared upon the huddled
figure as though he would destroy him with his eyes. "An' if it is I'll
swab the floor of hell with a wad of cotton wool on a toothpick, s'help
me the good Gawd!" he added, with a violent fling of horror and disgust.
It was impossible to silence him. He stood there shouting like one
possessed, horrible to see, horrible to hear--_because it was the
truth_. He repeated himself in fifty different ways, each more
outlandish than the last. The woods rang with echoes. At one time it
looked as if he meant to fling himself upon "the intruder," for his hand
continually jerked towards the long hunting knife in his belt.
But in the end he did nothing, and the whole tempest completed itself
very shortly with tears. Hank's voice suddenly broke, he collapsed on
the ground, and Cathcart somehow or other persuaded him at last to go
into the tent and lie quiet. The remainder of the affair, indeed, was
witnessed by him from behind the canvas, his white and terrified face
peeping through the crack of the tent door flap.
Then Dr. Cathcart, closely followed by his nephew who so far had kept
his courage better than all of them, went up with a determined air and
stood opposite to the figure of D�fago huddled over the fire. He looked
him squarely in the face and spoke. At first his voice was firm.
"D�fago, tell us what's happened--just a little, so that we can know
how best to help you?" he asked in a tone of authority, almost of
command. And at that point, it _was_ command. At once afterwards,
however, it changed in quality, for the figure turned up to him a face
so piteous, so terrible and so little like humanity, that the doctor
shrank back from him as from something spiritually unclean. Simpson,
watching close behind him, says he got the impression of a mask that was
on the verge of dropping off, and that underneath they would discover
something black and diabolical, revealed in utter nakedness. "Out with
it, man, out with it!" Cathcart cried, terror running neck and neck with
entreaty. "None of us can stand this much longer ...!" It was the cry of
instinct over reason.
And then "D�fago," smiling _whitely_, answered in that thin and fading
voice that already seemed passing over into a sound of quite another
character--
"I seen that great Wendigo thing," he whispered, sniffing the air about
him exactly like an animal. "I been with it too--"
Whether the poor devil would have said more, or whether Dr. Cathcart
would have continued the impossible cross examination cannot be known,
for at that moment the voice of Hank was heard yelling at the top of his
voice 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!"
D�fago, shuffling where he sat, had moved in such a way that for the
first time his legs were in full light and his feet were visible. Yet
Simpson had no time, himself, to see properly what Hank had seen. And
Hank has never seen fit to tell. That same instant, with a leap like
that of a frightened tiger, Cathcart was upon him, bundling the folds of
blanket about his legs with such speed that the young student caught
little more than a passing glimpse of something dark and oddly massed
where moccasined feet ought to have been, and saw even that but with
uncertain vision.
Then, before the doctor had time to do more, or Simpson time to even
think a question, much less ask it, D�fago was standing upright in front
of them, balancing with pain and difficulty, and upon his shapeless and
twisted visage an expression so dark and so malicious that it was, in
the 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 time
for--"
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