The chief’s voice had even taken on an impatient accent by the time the young squire reached his side.

“I should like much to know what is the cause of your deafness!  Are you dead or moonstruck that I must shout twenty times before you answer?  If your wits go sleep-walking, then may we as well give up, for I have depended upon them as upon crutches.  I want you to keep it in mind for me that it is after the river’s second bend to the right, but its fourth bend to the left, that the trees stand which I wish to mark.  And the spring—­the spring is—­”

“And the spring is beyond the third turning to the right,” the young man finished readily.  “The chief need give himself no uneasiness.  It is written on my brain as on parchment.”

Leif turned from him with something like an angry sigh.

“It needs to be more than written,” he said.  “It needs to be carved as with knives.”

On the crest of the bluff he paused suddenly to shake his fists in a passion of impotence.

“A man who has no more than a trained body is of less account than a beast!” he cried.  “My brain is near bursting with the details which I have sought to remember concerning these discoveries, and yet what assurance have I that I have got even half of them correct?  That I have not remembered what was of least importance, and confused this place with that, and garbled it all so that the next man who comes after me shall call me a liar and laugh at my pretensions?  And even though I relate every fact as truly as the Holy Book itself, what will there be left of it by the time it has passed through a hundred sottish brains in Greenland yonder?  I tell you, this stained rag of a cloak I wear is nearer to what it was first, than that tale will be after swinish mouths have chewed upon it a day.  It is the curse of the old gods upon the heathen.  And I fling my curse back at them, for the chains they have hung upon my free hands and the beast-dumbness with which they have gagged my man’s mouth.”

In an abandonment of fury, he shook both fists high over his head at the scattered star faces that were peering out of the pale sky.

Not till he had turned and stamped away over the snapping twigs, did his men come out of their trance of bewilderment.

As they resumed their climbing, Eyvind the Ice-lander observed sagely, “Never saw I any one whose speech reminded me so strongly of the hot springs we have at home.  All of a sudden, without warning or cause, the words shoot up into the air, boiling hot; and it would be as much as one’s life is worth to try to stop them.  It is incomprehensible.”

Passing amused comments, they gained the crest and vanished over it, without noticing that the Norman still stood where the chief had left him, with every appearance of being equally bereft of his senses.

With parted lips, and hands nervously opening and shutting by his side, he stood staring away into the dusk before him, until the voices of those who were coming after with the spoils fell on his ear and aroused him.  Then he raised to the stars a face that was fairly convulsed with excitement, and took the rest of the climb in three wild leaps.