“Defago, 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 “Defago,” 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!”

Defago, 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, Defago 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—­”

His piteous and beseeching voice was interrupted by a sound that was like the roar of wind coming across the lake.  The trees overhead shook their tangled branches.  The blazing fire bent its flames as before a blast.  And something swept with a terrific, rushing noise about the little camp and seemed to surround it entirely in a single moment of time.  Defago shook the clinging blankets from his body, turned