With the net result that Dr. Cathcart, adroit psychologist that he fancied himself to be, had assured him clearly enough exactly where his mind, influenced by loneliness, bewilderment and terror, had yielded to the strain and invited delusion.  While praising his conduct, he managed at the same time to point out where, when, and how his mind had gone astray.  He made his nephew think himself finer than he was by judicious praise, yet more foolish than he was by minimizing the value of the evidence.  Like many another materialist, that is, he lied cleverly on the basis of insufficient knowledge, because the knowledge supplied seemed to his own particular intelligence inadmissible.

“The spell of these terrible solitudes,” he said, “cannot leave any mind untouched, any mind, that is, possessed of the higher imaginative qualities.  It has worked upon yours exactly as it worked upon my own when I was your age.  The animal that haunted your little camp was undoubtedly a moose, for the ‘belling’ of a moose may have, sometimes, a very peculiar quality of sound.  The colored appearance of the big tracks was obviously a defect of vision in your own eyes produced by excitement.  The size and stretch of the tracks we shall prove when we come to them.  But the hallucination of an audible voice, of course, is one of the commonest forms of delusion due to mental excitement—­an excitement, my dear boy, perfectly excusable, and, let me add, wonderfully controlled by you under the circumstances.  For the rest, I am bound to say, you have acted with a splendid courage, for the terror of feeling oneself lost in this wilderness is nothing short of awful, and, had I been in your place, I don’t for a moment believe I could have behaved with one quarter of your wisdom and decision.  The only thing I find it uncommonly difficult to explain is—­that—­damned odor.”

“It made me feel sick, I assure you,” declared his nephew, “positively dizzy!” His uncle’s attitude of calm omniscience, merely because he knew more psychological formulae, made him slightly defiant.  It was so easy to be wise in the explanation of an experience one has not personally witnessed.  “A kind of desolate and terrible odor is the only way I can describe it,” he concluded, glancing at the features of the quiet, unemotional man beside him.

“I can only marvel,” was the reply, “that under the circumstances it did not seem to you even worse.”  The dry words, Simpson knew, hovered between the truth, and his uncle’s interpretation of “the truth.”

* * * * *

And so at last they came to the little camp and found the tent still standing, the remains of the fire, and the piece of paper pinned to a stake beside it—­untouched.  The cache, poorly contrived by inexperienced hands, however, had been discovered and opened—­by musk rats, mink and squirrel.  The matches lay scattered about the opening, but the food had been taken to the last crumb.