III

At length, after a long pause, he began to talk.

“Queer thing,” he added in a hurried sort of voice, as though he wanted to say something and get it over.  “Queer thing.  I mean, about that otter last night.”

I had expected something so totally different that he caught me with surprise, and I looked up sharply.

“Shows how lonely this place is.  Otters are awfully shy things—­”

“I don’t mean that, of course,” he interrupted.  “I mean—­do you think—­did you think it really was an otter?”

“What else, in the name of Heaven, what else?”

“You know, I saw it before you did, and at first it seemed—­so much bigger than an otter.”

“The sunset as you looked up-stream magnified it, or something,” I replied.

He looked at me absently a moment, as though his mind were busy with other thoughts.

“It had such extraordinary yellow eyes,” he went on half to himself.

“That was the sun too,” I laughed, a trifle boisterously.  “I suppose you’ll wonder next if that fellow in the boat—­”

I suddenly decided not to finish the sentence.  He was in the act again of listening, turning his head to the wind, and something in the expression of his face made me halt.  The subject dropped, and we went on with our caulking.  Apparently he had not noticed my unfinished sentence.  Five minutes later, however, he looked at me across the canoe, the smoking pitch in his hand, his face exceedingly grave.

“I did rather wonder, if you want to know,” he said slowly, “what that thing in the boat was.  I remember thinking at the time it was not a man.  The whole business seemed to rise quite suddenly out of the water.”

I laughed again boisterously in his face, but this time there was impatience, and a strain of anger too, in my feeling.

“Look here now,” I cried, “this place is quite queer enough without going out of our way to imagine things!  That boat was an ordinary boat, and the man in it was an ordinary man, and they were both going down-stream as fast as they could lick.  And that otter was an otter, so don’t let’s play the fool about it!”

He looked steadily at me with the same grave expression.  He was not in the least annoyed.  I took courage from his silence.

“And, for Heaven’s sake,” I went on, “don’t keep pretending you hear things, because it only gives me the jumps, and there’s nothing to hear but the river and this cursed old thundering wind.”

“You fool!” he answered in a low, shocked voice, “you utter fool.  That’s just the way all victims talk.  As if you didn’t understand just as well as I do!” he sneered with scorn in his voice, and a sort of resignation.  “The best thing you can do is to keep quiet and try to hold your mind as firm as possible.  This feeble attempt at self-deception only makes the truth harder when you’re forced to meet it.”