They talked little, and then only of the most wholesome and common things, for their minds were charged with painful thoughts that clamoured for explanation, though no one dared refer to them.  Hank, being nearest to primitive conditions, was the first to find himself, for he was also less complex.  In Dr. Cathcart “civilization” championed his forces against an attack singular enough.  To this day, perhaps, he is not quite sure of certain things.  Anyhow, he took longer to “find himself.”

Simpson, the student of divinity, it was who arranged his conclusions probably with the best, though not most scientific, appearance of order.  Out there, in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely witnessed something crudely and essentially primitive.  Something that had survived somehow the advance of humanity had emerged terrifically, betraying a scale of life still monstrous and immature.  He envisaged it rather as a glimpse into prehistoric ages, when superstitions, gigantic and uncouth, still oppressed the hearts of men; when the forces of nature were still untamed, the Powers that may have haunted a primeval universe not yet withdrawn.  To this day he thinks of what he termed years later in a sermon “savage and formidable Potencies lurking behind the souls of men, not evil perhaps in themselves, yet instinctively hostile to humanity as it exists.”

With his uncle he never discussed the matter in detail, for the barrier between the two types of mind made it difficult.  Only once, years later, something led them to the frontier of the subject—­of a single detail of the subject, rather—­

“Can’t you even tell me what—­they were like?” he asked; and the reply, though conceived in wisdom, was not encouraging, “It is far better you should not try to know, or to find out.”

“Well—­that odour...?” persisted the nephew.  “What do you make of that?”

Dr. Cathcart looked at him and raised his eyebrows.

“Odours,” he replied, “are not so easy as sounds and sights of telepathic communication.  I make as much, or as little, probably, as you do yourself.”

He was not quite so glib as usual with his explanations.  That was all.

* * * * *

At the fall of day, cold, exhausted, famished, the party came to the end of the long portage and dragged themselves into a camp that at first glimpse seemed empty.  Fire there was none, and no Punk came forward to welcome them.  The emotional capacity of all three was too over-spent to recognize either surprise or annoyance; but the cry of spontaneous affection that burst from the lips of Hank, as he rushed ahead of them towards the fire-place, came probably as a warning that the end of the amazing affair was not quite yet.  And both Cathcart and his nephew confessed afterwards that when they saw him kneel down in his excitement and embrace something that reclined, gently moving, beside the extinguished ashes, they felt in their very bones that this “something” would prove to be Defago—­the true Defago, returned.