The woman, or Bella, was a comely Indian girl, young, and the prettiest St. Vincent had run across.  Instead of the customary greased swarthiness of the race, her skin was clear and of a light-bronze tone, and her features less harsh, more felicitously curved, than those common to the blood.

After supper, Borg, both elbows on table and huge misshapen hands supporting chin and jaws, sat puffing stinking Siwash tobacco and staring straight before him.  It would have seemed ruminative, the stare, had his eyes been softer or had he blinked; as it was, his face was set and trance-like.

“Have you been in the country long?” St. Vincent asked, endeavoring to make conversation.

Borg turned his sullen-black eyes upon him, and seemed to look into him and through him and beyond him, and, still regarding him, to have forgotten all about him.  It was as though he pondered some great and weighty matter—­probably his sins, the correspondent mused nervously, rolling himself a cigarette.  When the yellow cube had dissipated itself in curling fragrance, and he was deliberating about rolling a second, Borg suddenly spoke.

“Fifteen years,” he said, and returned to his tremendous cogitation.

Thereat, and for half an hour thereafter, St. Vincent, fascinated, studied his inscrutable countenance.  To begin with, it was a massive head, abnormal and top-heavy, and its only excuse for being was the huge bull-throat which supported it.  It had been cast in a mould of elemental generousness, and everything about it partook of the asymmetrical crudeness of the elemental.  The hair, rank of growth, thick and unkempt, matted itself here and there into curious splotches of gray; and again, grinning at age, twisted itself into curling locks of lustreless black—­locks of unusual thickness, like crooked fingers, heavy and solid.  The shaggy whiskers, almost bare in places, and in others massing into bunchgrass-like clumps, were plentifully splashed with gray.  They rioted monstrously over his face and fell raggedly to his chest, but failed to hide the great hollowed cheeks or the twisted mouth.  The latter was thin-lipped and cruel, but cruel only in a passionless sort of way.  But the forehead was the anomaly,—­the anomaly required to complete the irregularity of the face.  For it was a perfect forehead, full and broad, and rising superbly strong to its high dome.  It was as the seat and bulwark of some vast intelligence; omniscience might have brooded there.

Bella, washing the dishes and placing them away on the shelf behind Borg’s back, dropped a heavy tin cup.  The cabin was very still, and the sharp rattle came without warning.  On the instant, with a brute roar, the chair was overturned and Borg was on his feet, eyes blazing and face convulsed.  Bella gave an inarticulate, animal-like cry of fear and cowered at his feet.  St. Vincent felt his hair bristling, and an uncanny chill, like a jet of cold air, played up and down his spine.  Then Borg righted the chair and sank back into his old position, chin on hands and brooding ponderously.  Not a word was spoken, and Bella went on unconcernedly with the dishes, while St. Vincent rolled, a shaky cigarette and wondered if it had been a dream.