And so it was that even when I heard the thud, thud of a man’s step behind me I did not turn.  A man’s step is unlike an animal’s, and I had no doubt in my heart that a man was coming.  But let him come to me.  My immediate and pressing concern was to repair my canoe that I might get to camp, and I would squander neither movement nor eyesight till that was done.  A few moments before it had seemed a vital matter to find what creatures they were that whispered and rustled past me in the grayness.  Now my anxiety was transferred.

The echoing fog played witchcraft with the step as it had done with the other noises.  The sound came, came, came,—­a steady, moderate note; no haste, no dallying, no indecision.  Quiet, purposeful, controlled, it sounded; that pace, pace, that came through the twig-carpeted timber.  The Greek Fates were pictured as moving with just that even relentlessness of stride.  Yet in life, so far as I have seen it, tragedies commonly pounce upon us, like a wolfish cat upon her prey, and we find ourselves stunned and mangled before we gather dignity to meet the blow.  I thought of this, in an incoherent, muddy way, as the step came nearer.  And I worked with hurrying hands at the canoe.

Then came a voice.  No whispering, no rustling, nothing vague and formless and haunting, but a low, commanding call:—­

“Bonjour, mon ami.”

I did not start.  If I turned slowly it was because I knew what was waiting me, and was adjusting several possibilities to meet it.  It was a man’s voice that called, yet its every inflection was familiar, familiar as the beating of my heart.  For madame, my wife, had called to me more or less often in the twin of that voice with its slurring deliberateness and its insolent disregard of the pitfall accents of a foreign tongue.  And now I turned to meet her cousin, the man whom she had promised to marry; the man who had deserted her to the knives of savages; the man whom she despised and yet feared, and who now called to me in a voice that was hers and yet was not; that haunted and repelled, all in one.  I did not think out any of this by rule and line.  I only knew that I dreaded meeting this man who was stepping, stepping into my life through the fog, and that I turned to meet him with my heart like ice but my brain on fire.

I had ado to keep my tongue from exclaiming when I turned.  I do not know why I expected the man to be small, except that I myself am overly large, and that I was looking for him to be my antithesis in every way.  But the figure that loomed toward me out of the luminous mist dwarfed my own stature.  Never had my eyes seen so powerful a man.  Long and swinging as an elk, he had the immense, humped shoulders of a buffalo and the length of arm of a baboon.  His head would have sat well on some rough bronze coin of an early day.  Semitic in type he looked, with his eagle-beaked nose and prominent cheek bones, but the blue of his eyes was English.  They were intelligent eyes.