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“You ain’t Defaygo! You ain’t Defaygo at all! I don’t give a–damn, but that ain’t you, my ole pal of twenty years!” He glared upon the huddled figure as though he would destroy him with his eyes. “An’ if it is I’ll swab the floor of hell with a wad of cotton wool on a toothpick, s’help me the good Gawd!” he added, with a violent fling of horror and disgust.

It was impossible to silence him. He stood there shouting like one possessed, horrible to see, horrible to hear–because it was the truth. He repeated himself in fifty different ways, each more outlandish than the last. The woods rang with echoes. At one time it looked as if he meant to fling himself upon “the intruder,” for his hand continually jerked towards the long hunting knife in his belt.

But in the end he did nothing, and the whole tempest completed itself very shortly with tears. Hank’s voice suddenly broke, he collapsed on the ground, and Cathcart somehow or other persuaded him at last to go into the tent and lie quiet. The remainder of the affair, indeed, was witnessed by him from behind the canvas, his white and terrified face peeping through the crack of the tent door flap.

Then Dr. Cathcart, closely followed by his nephew who so far had kept his courage better than all of them, went up with a determined air and stood opposite to the figure of Defago huddled over the fire. He looked him squarely in the face and spoke. At first his voice was firm.

“Defago, tell us what’s happened–just a little, so that we can know how best to help you?” he asked in a tone of authority, almost of command. And at that point, it was command. At once afterwards, however, it changed in quality, for the figure turned up to him a face so piteous, so terrible and so little like humanity, that the doctor shrank back from him as from something spiritually unclean. Simpson, watching close behind him, says he got the impression of a mask that was on the verge of dropping off, and that underneath they would discover something black and diabolical, revealed in utter nakedness. “Out with it, man, out with it!” Cathcart cried, terror running neck and neck with entreaty. “None of us can stand this much longer …!” It was the cry of instinct over reason.

And then “Defago,” smiling whitely, answered in that thin and fading voice that already seemed passing over into a sound of quite another character–

“I seen that great Wendigo thing,” he whispered, sniffing the air about him exactly like an animal. “I been with it too–“

Whether the poor devil would have said more, or whether Dr. Cathcart would have continued the impossible cross examination cannot be known, for at that moment the voice of Hank was heard yelling at the top of his voice from behind the canvas that concealed all but his terrified eyes. Such a howling was never heard.

“His feet! Oh, Gawd, his feet! Look at his great changed–feet!”

Defago, shuffling where he sat, had moved in such a way that for the first time his legs were in full light and his feet were visible. Yet Simpson had no time, himself, to see properly what Hank had seen. And Hank has never seen fit to tell. That same instant, with a leap like that of a frightened tiger, Cathcart was upon him, bundling the folds of blanket about his legs with such speed that the young student caught little more than a passing glimpse of something dark and oddly massed where moccasined feet ought to have been, and saw even that but with uncertain vision.

Then, before the doctor had time to do more, or Simpson time to even think a question, much less ask it, Defago was standing upright in front of them, balancing with pain and difficulty, and upon his shapeless and twisted visage an expression so dark and so malicious that it was, in the true sense, monstrous.