search all day for buck which are not. Gloom had settled on his mind
also; he felt his brother's loss more acutely now than on the day he
buried him. Moreover, for the first time he suffered from symptoms of
the deadly fever which had carried off his three companions. Alas!
he knew too well the meaning of this lassitude and nausea, and of the
racking pain which from time to time shot through his head and limbs.
That was how his brother's last sickness had begun.

Would his own days end in the same fashion? He did not greatly care, he
was reckless as to his fate, for the hard necessities of life had left
him little time or inclination to rack himself with spiritual doubts.
And yet it was awful to think of. He rehearsed the whole scene in his
mind again and yet again until it became a reality to him. He saw his
own last struggle for life and Otter watching it. He saw the dwarf
bearing him in his great arms to a lonely grave, there to cover him with
earth, and then, with a sigh, to flee the haunted spot for ever. Why
did he stop to die of fever? Because his brother had bidden him to do so
with his dying breath; because of a superstition, a folly, which would
move any civilised man to scorn.

Ah! there was the rub, he was no longer a civilised man; he had lived so
long with nature and savages that he had come to be as nature makes
the savage. His educated reason told him that this was folly, but his
instinct--that faculty which had begun to take the place of educated
reason with him--spoke in another voice. He had gone back in the scale
of life, he had grown primitive; his mind was as the mind of a Norseman
or of an Aztec. It did not seem wonderful to him that his brother should
have prophesied upon his dying bed; it did not strike him as strange
even that he should believe in the prophecy and act upon it. And yet
he knew that in all probability this obedience would result in his own