Benis chuckled.  “No, it wouldn’t.  Terrible old blunderer, Nature!  Always working for the average.  Never seems to have heard the word ‘specialize.’  We’ve got her there.”

“Then you think—­”

“Oh no,” hastily, “I don’t.  I observe results with interest, that is all.”

Desire began to collect the breakfast dishes.  “That was where the book seemed weak,” she said thoughtfully.  “It hadn’t much to say about results.  It dealt mostly with consequences.  They,” she added after a pause, “were rather frightening.”

The professor glanced at her sharply.  Had she been worrying over this?  Had she connected it with that dreadful old man whom she called father?  But her face was quite untroubled as she went on.

“I think they’ve missed something, though,” she said.  “There must be something more than the things they tabulate.  Some subtle force of life which isn’t physical at all.  Something that uses physical things as tools.  If its tools are fine, it will do finer work, but if its tools are blunt it will work with them anyway.  And it gets things done.”

“By Jove!” said Spence.  This was one of Desire’s “windows with a view.”  He was always stumbling upon them.  But he knew she was shy of comment.  “We’ll tell Aunt Caroline that,” he murmured hopefully.  “It may distract her mind.” . . .

That day they found and followed the trail to the shack of Hawk-Eye Charlie.  It proved to be neither long nor arduous.  The professor managed it with ease.  But he would have been quite unable to manage the hawk-eyed one without the expert aid of his secretary.  To his unaccustomed mind their quarry was almost witless and exceedingly dirty.  But Desire knew her Indian.

“It isn’t what he is, but what he knows,” she explained.  “And he has a retiring nature.”

So very retiring was it that only fair words, aided by tactful displays of tea and tobacco, could penetrate its reservations.  Desire was quite unhurried.  But presently she began to extract bits of carefully hidden knowledge.  It had to be slow work, for, witless as he of the hawk-eye seemed, he was well aware of the value (in tobacco) of a wise conservation.  He who babbles all he knows upon first asking is a fool.  But he who withholds beyond patience is a fool also.  Was it not so?  Desire agreed that a middle course is undoubtedly the path of wisdom.  She added, carelessly, that the white-man-who-wished-stories was in no hurry.  Neither had he come seeking much for little.  Payment would be made strictly on account of value received.  The tea was good.  And the tobacco exceptionally strong, as anyone could tell from a distance.  Why then should the hawk-eyed one delay his own felicity?