efago steered the craft of
birch bark like a thing of life, answering cheerfully all his
companion's questions. Both were gay and light-hearted. On such
occasions men lose the superficial, worldly distinctions; they become
human beings working together for a common end. Simpson, the employer,
and Defago the employed, among these primitive forces, were simply--two
men, the "guider" and the "guided." Superior knowledge, of course,
assumed control, and the younger man fell without a second thought into
the quasi-subordinate position. He never dreamed of objecting when
Defago dropped the "Mr.," and addressed him as "Say, Simpson," or
"Simpson, boss," which was invariably the case before they reached the
farther shore after a stiff paddle of twelve miles against a head wind.
He only laughed, and liked it; then ceased to notice it at all.

For this "divinity student" was a young man of parts and character,
though as yet, of course, untraveled; and on this trip--the first time
he had seen any country but his own and little Switzerland--the huge
scale of things somewhat bewildered him. It was one thing, he realized,
to hear about primeval forests, but quite another to see them. While to
dwell in them and seek acquaintance with their wild life was, again, an
initiation that no intelligent man could undergo without a certain
shifting of personal values hitherto held for permanent and sacred.

Simpson knew the first faint indication of this emotion when he held the
new.303 rifle in his hands and looked along its pair of faultless,
gleaming barrels. The three days' journey to their headquarters, by lake
and portage, had carried the process a stage farther. And now that he
was about to plunge beyond even the fringe of wilderness where they were
camped into the virgin heart of uninhabited regions as vast as Europe
itself, the true nature of the situation stole upon him with an effect
of delight and awe that his imagination was fully capable of
appreciating. It was himself and Defago against a multitude--at least,
against a Titan!

The bleak splendors of these remote and lonely forests rather
overwhelmed him with the sense of his own littleness. That stern quality
of the tangled backwoods which can only be described as merciless and
terrible, rose out of these far blue woods swimming upon the horizon,
and revealed itself. He understood the silent warning. He realized his
own utter helplessness. Only Defago, as a symbol of a distant