Rising, Carl stumbled blindly in the wake of the tall figure striding on ahead.  They halted at last at a wigwam on the fringe of the camp.  Philip lighted a lantern, his white face fixed and expressionless as stone.

“You were going to kill her!” he said abruptly.

“Yes,” said Carl.  He shuddered.

In the silence the storm battered fiercely at the wigwam.

Philip wheeled furiously.

“What is it?” he demanded.  “In God’s name what threatens her, that even here in these God-forsaken wilds she is not safe?” He towered grim above the crouching man on the floor of the wigwam.  “For months I have guarded her day and night,” he went on fiercely, “from some damnable mystery and treachery that has almost muddled my life beyond repair.  What is it?  Why were you creeping to her wigwam to-night with a knife in your hand?”

Carl flinched beneath the blazing anger and contempt in his eyes.  The droning in his head grew suddenly to a roar.  The nausea flamed again over his body.  For a dizzy interval he confused the noise of the storm with the drone in his head.  Philip seized the lantern and bending, stared closely into his white face and haunted eyes.

“You’re ill!” he said gently.

“Yes,” said Carl.  “I—­I think so.”  He met Philip’s glance of sympathy with one of wild imploring.  It was the man’s desperate effort to keep this one friend from sweeping hostilely out of his life on the wings of the dark, impious tempest he had roused himself.  To his disordered brain nothing else mattered.  Philip had trusted him always—­and his knife had menaced Philip.  In Philip’s hand lay then, though he could not know it, the future of the man at his feet.  In the silence Carl fell pitifully to shaking.

“Steady, Carl!” exclaimed Philip kindly and setting the lantern down, slipped a strong, reassuring arm about the other’s shoulders.

In that second Philip proved his caliber.  With big inherent generosity he saw beyond the bloated mask of brutal passion and resolve.  Miraculously he understood and said so.  This white, haggard face, marked cruelly with dissipation and suffering, was the face of a man at the end of the way.  In his darkest hour he needed—­not an inexorable censor—­but a friend.  With heroic effort Philip put aside the evil memory of the past hour, though his sore heart rebelled.

“Carl,” he said gently, “you’ve got to pull up.  You’ve come to the wall at last.  You know what lies on the other side?”

Carl shuddered.

“Yes,” he whispered.  “Madness—­or—­or suicide.  One of the two must come in time.”

“Madness or suicide!” repeated Philip slowly and there was a great pity in his eyes.

Carl caught the look and his face grew whiter beneath its tan.  Chin and jaw muscles went suddenly taut.

“Philip,” he choked, unnerved by the other’s gentleness, “you don’t—­you can’t mean—­you believe in me—­yet?”