ess.

CHAPTER X. THE WAY IN AND THE WAY OUT

In his own world of the parish of Chaudiere Jo Portugais was counted a
widely travelled man. He had adventured freely on the great rivers and
in the forests, and had journeyed up towards Hudson's Bay farther than
any man in seven parishes.

Jo's father and mother had both died in one year--when he was
twenty-five. That year had turned him from a clean-shaven cheerful boy
into a morose bearded man who looked forty, for it had been marked by
his disappearance from Chaudiere and his return at the end of it, to
find his mother dead and his father dying broken-hearted. What had
driven Jo from home only his father knew; what had happened to him
during that year only Jo himself knew, and he told no one, not even his
dying father.

A mystery surrounded him, and no one pierced it. He was a figure apart
in Chaudiere parish. A dreadful memory that haunted him, carried him out
of the village, which clustered round the parish church, into Vadrome
Mountain, three miles away, where he lived apart from all his kind. It
was here he brought the man with the eye-glass one early dawn, after two
nights and two days on the river, pulling him up the long hill in a
low cart with his strong faithful dogs, hitching himself with them and
toiling upwards through the dark. In his three-roomed hut he laid his
charge down upon a pile of bear-skins, and tended him with a strange
gentleness, bathing the wound in the head and binding it again and
again.

The next morning the sick man opened his eyes heavily. He then began
fumbling mechanically on his breast. At last his fingers found his
monocle. He feebly put it to his eye, and looked at Jo in a strange,
questioning, uncomprehending way.

"I beg--your pardon," he said haltingly, "have I ever--been intro--"
Suddenly his eyes closed, a frown gathered on his forehead. After
a minute his eyes opened again, and he gazed with painful, pathetic
seriousness at Jo. This grew to a kind of childish terror; then slowly,
as a shadow passes, the perplexity, anxiety and terror cleared away,
and left his forehead calm, his eyes unvexed and peaceful. The monocle
dropped, and he did not heed it. At length he said wearily, and with an
incredibly simple dependence:

"I am thirsty now."

Jo lifted a wooden bowl to his lips, and he drank, drank, drank to
repletion. When he had finished he patted Jo's shoulder.

"I am always thirsty," he said. "I shall be hungry