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 like the guide they had last seen alive than the picture of a man of sixty is like a daguerreotype of his early youth in the costume of another generation.  Nothing really can describe that ghastly caricature, that parody, masquerading there in the firelight as Defago.  From the ruins of the dark and awful memories he still retains, Simpson declares that the face was more animal than human, the features drawn about into wrong proportions, the skin loose and hanging, as though he had been subjected to extraordinary pressures and tensions.  It made him think vaguely of those bladder faces blown up by the hawkers on Ludgate Hill, that change their expression as they swell, and as they collapse emit a faint and wailing imitation of a voice.  Both face and voice suggested some such abominable resemblance.  But Cathcart long afterwards, seeking to describe the indescribable, asserts that thus might have looked a face and body that had been in air so rarified that, the weight of atmosphere being removed, the entire structure threatened to fly asunder and become—­incoherent....

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 Defaygo!  You ain’t Defaygo 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 Defago huddled over the fire.  He looked him squarely in the face and spoke.  At first his voice was firm.