All at once his heart seemed to pause in his breast.  He was listening,—­for what he did not know.  His eyes strained into the shadows.  Brush wavered, a twig cracked with a miniature explosion.  And then two figures emerged into the beaver meadow opposite him.

They were only creatures of the wild, an old cow moose, black and ungainly, and her long-legged, awkward calf.  Yet they supplied the detail that was missing.  They were the one thing needed to complete the picture—­the crowning touch that revealed this land as it was—­the virgin wilderness where the creatures of the wild still held full sway.

But it did more.  All at once a great clarity seemed to take possession of his mind.  Here, in these dark forests, were the stimuli of which Forest, the alienist, had spoken; and his brain seemed to leap, as in one impulse, to the truth.  Suddenly he knew the answer to all the questions and problems that had troubled him so long.

Many times, in the past years, he had seen logs jammed in the water, a veritable labyrinth that defied dissolution.  Suddenly, as if by magic, the key log would be ejected, and the whole jam would break, shatter down in one stupendous crash, settle and dissolve, leaving at last only drift logs floating quietly in the river.  Thus it was with the confusion in his brain.  All at once it seemed to dissolve, the tangled skeins straightened out, the association areas of his mind stirred full into life once more.  As he sat there, pale as the twilight sky, the mists of amnesia lifted from him.  He was cured as if by the touch of a holy man.

No wonder these forests depths were familiar.  His boyhood and early manhood, clear until the vortex of war had engulfed him, had been spent amid just such surroundings, in just such silences, on the banks of just such wilderness rivers.  The same sky line of dark, heaven-reaching spruce had fronted him of old.  He sprang up, his eyes blazing.  “I remember everything,” an inaudible voice spoke within him.  Then he whispered, fervently, to his familiar wilds.  “And I have come home.”

VII

Everything was as it should be, as he and Ezram made the camp.  He himself cut the boughs for their beds, laid them with his remembered skill, spread the blankets, and kept the fire blazing while Ezram cooked; afterwards he knew the indescribable peace of a pipe smoke beside the glowing coals.  He saw the moon come up at last, translating the spruce forest into a fairy land.

Of course he had remembered the moon.  How many times had he watched for its argent gleam on the sky line, the vivid, detailed silhouette of the spruce against it; and then its slow-spreading glory through the still, dark forests!  The spires of the trees grew ensilvered, as always; immense nebulous patches lay between the trunks, shadows stole mysteriously, phantoms met, lingered, and vanished.