ould sit up
and stare into the woods, intently listening, and whisper, "How terrible
in the wilderness are--are the feet of them that--" until his uncle came
across the change the direction of his thoughts and comfort him.

The hysteria, fortunately, proved but temporary. Sleep cured him, just
as it cured Hank.

Till the first signs of daylight came, soon after five o'clock, Dr.
Cathcart kept his vigil. His face was the color of chalk, and there were
strange flushes beneath the eyes. An appalling terror of the soul
battled with his will all through those silent hours. These were some of
the outer signs ...

At dawn he lit the fire himself, made breakfast, and woke the others,
and by seven they were well on their way back to the home camp--three
perplexed and afflicted men, but each in his own way having reduced his
inner turmoil to a condition of more or less systematized order again.

IX

They talked little, and then only of the most wholesome and common
things, for their minds were charged with painful thoughts that
clamoured for explanation, though no one dared refer to them. Hank,
being nearest to primitive conditions, was the first to find himself,
for he was also less complex. In Dr. Cathcart "civilization" championed
his forces against an attack singular enough. To this day, perhaps, he
is not _quite_ sure of certain things. Anyhow, he took longer to "find
himself."

Simpson, the student of divinity, it was who arranged his conclusions
probably with the best, though not most scientific, appearance of order.
Out there, in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely
witnessed something crudely and essentially primitive. Something that
had survived somehow the advance of humanity had emerged terrifically,
betraying a scale of life still monstrous and immature. He envisaged it
rather as a glimpse into prehistoric ages, when superstitions, gigantic
and uncouth, still oppressed the hearts of men; when the forces of nature
were still untamed, the Powers that may have haunted a primeval universe
not yet withdrawn. To this day he thinks of what he termed years later
in a sermon "savage and formidable Potencies lurking behind the souls of
men, not evil perhaps in themselves, yet instinctively hostile to humanity
as it exists."

With his uncle he never discussed the matter in detail, for the barrier
between the two types of mind made it difficult. Only once, years later,
something led them to the f