The native hard-headedness of his race
reclaimed him.
And this doubtless explains why he found it so hard to tell that group
round the fire--everything. He told enough, however, for the immediate
decision to be arrived at that a relief party must start at the earliest
possible moment, and that Simpson, in order to guide it capably, must
first have food and, above all, sleep. Dr. Cathcart observing the lad's
condition more shrewdly than his patient knew, gave him a very slight
injection of morphine. For six hours he slept like the dead.
From the description carefully written out afterwards by this student of
divinity, it appears that the account he gave to the astonished group
omitted sundry vital and important details. He declares that, with his
uncle's wholesome, matter-of-fact countenance staring him in the face,
he simply had not the courage to mention them. Thus, all the search
party gathered, it would seem, was that Defago had suffered in the night
an acute and inexplicable attack of mania, had imagined himself "called"
by someone or something, and had plunged into the bush after it without
food or rifle, where he must die a horrible and lingering death by cold
and starvation unless he could be found and rescued in time. "In time,"
moreover, meant _at once_.
In the course of the following day, however--they were off by seven,
leaving Punk in charge with instructions to have food and fire always
ready--Simpson found it possible to tell his uncle a good deal more of
the story's true inwardness, without divining that it was drawn out of
him as a matter of fact by a very subtle form of cross examination.
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