Something like a skin of horror almost perceptibly drew down in that moment over every face, and three pairs of eyes shone through it as though they saw across the frontiers of normal vision into the Unknown.

Defago advanced, his tread faltering and uncertain; he made his way straight up to them as a group first, then turned sharply and peered close into the face of Simpson.  The sound of a voice issued from his lips—­

“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’m havin’ 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 figures with the wax-white skins.  Hank immediately sprang forward with a stream of oaths so farfetched that Simpson did not recognize them as English at all, but thought he had lapsed into 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.