The presentiment of a

nameless doom lurked ill-concealed behind every detail of what had

happened.

It was really admirable how he emerged victor in the end; men of

riper powers and experience might have come through the ordeal with

less success. He had himself tolerably well in hand, all things

considered, and his plan of action proves it. Sleep being absolutely

out of the question and travelling an unknown trail in the darkness

equally impracticable, he sat up the whole of that night, rifle in

hand, before a fire he never for a single moment allowed to die down.

The severity of the haunted vigil marked his soul for life; but it was

successfully accomplished; and with the very first signs of dawn he set

forth upon the long return journey to the home-camp to get help. As

before, he left a written note to explain his absence, and to indicate

where he had left a plentiful cache of food and matches — though he

had no expectation that any human hands would find them!

How Simpson found his way alone by the lake and forest might well

make a story in itself, for to hear him tell it is to know the

passionate loneliness of soul that a man can feel when the Wilderness

holds him in the hollow of its illimitable hand — and laughs. It is

also to admire his indomitable pluck.

He claims no skill, declaring that he followed the almost invisible

trail mechanically, and without thinking. And this, doubtless, is the

truth. He relied upon the guiding of the unconscious mind, which is

instinct. Perhaps, too, some sense of orientation, known to animals and

primitive men, may have helped as well, for through all that tangled

region he succeeded in reaching the exact spot where Defago had hidden

the canoe nearly three days before with the remark, “Strike doo west

across the lake into the sun to find the camp.”

There was not much sun left to guide him, but he used his compass

to the best of his ability, embarking in the frail craft for the last

twelve miles of his journey, with a sensation of immense relief that

the forest was at last behind him. And, fortunately, the water was

calm; he took his line across the centre of the lake instead of

coasting round the shores for another twenty miles. Fortunately, too,

the other hunters were back. The light of their fires furnished a

steering-point without which he might have searched all night long for

the actual position of the camp.

It was close upon midnight all the same when his canoe grated on

the sandy cove, and Hank, Punk and his uncle, disturbed in their sleep

by his cries, ran quickly down and helped a very exhausted and broken

specimen of Scotch humanity over the rocks towards a dying fire.

VI

The sudden entrance of his prosaic uncle into this world of

wizardry and horror that had haunted him without interruption now for

two days and two nights, had the immediate effect of giving to the

affair an entirely new aspect. The sound of that crisp “Hulloa, my boy!

And what’s up now?” and the grasp of that dry and vigorous hand

introduced another standard of judgment. A revulsion of feeling washed

through him. He realized that he had let himself “go” rather badly. He

even felt vaguely ashamed of himself. The native hard-headedness of his

race reclaimed him.

And that doubtless explains why he found it so hard to tell that

group round the fire — everything. He told enough, however, for the

immediate decision to be arrived at that a relief party must start at

the earliest possible moment, and that Simpson, in order to guide it

capably, must first have food and, above all, sleep. Dr. Cathcart

observing the lad’s condition more shrewdly than his patient knew, gave

him a very slight injection of morphine. For six hours he slept like

the dead.

From the description carefully written out afterwards by this

student of divinity, it appears that the account he gave to the

astonished group omitted sundry vital and important details. He

declares that, with his uncle’s wholesome matter-of-fact countenance

staring him in the face, he simply had not the courage to mention them.

Thus, all the search-party gathered, it would seem, was that Defago had

suffered in the night an acute and inexplicable attack of mania, had

imagined himself “called” by some one or something, and had plunged

into the bush after it without food or rifle, where he must die a

horrible and lingering death by cold and starvation unless he could be

found and rescued in time. “In time,” moreover, meant at once.