It's the song they sing in lumber camps and godforsaken places like that, when they're skeered the Wendigo's somewhere around, doin' a bit of swift traveling.

" "And what's the Wendigo, pray?"

By the time they reached the beginning of the trail, where the canoe was laid up against the return journey, he had mentioned how Défago spoke vaguely of "something he called a 'Wendigo'"; how he cried in his sleep; how he imagined an unusual scent about the camp; and had betrayed other symptoms of mental excitement.

For he admitted that a story ran over all this section of country to the effect that several Indians had "seen the Wendigo" along the shores of Fifty Island Water in the "fall" of last year, and that this was the true reason of Défago's disinclination to hunt there.

"When an Indian goes crazy," he explained, talking to himself more than to the others, it seemed, "it's always put that he's 'seen the Wendigo.'

"But Défago surely had already told you all these details of the Wendigo legend, my dear fellow," insisted the doctor.

"The legend is picturesque enough," observed the doctor after one of the longer pauses, speaking to break it rather than because he had anything to say, "for the Wendigo is simply the Call of the Wild personified, which some natures hear to their own destruction.

"The Wendigo," he added, "is said to burn his feetowing to the friction, apparently caused by its tremendous velocitytill they drop off, and new ones form exactly like its own.

"It's a moss-eater, is the Wendigo," he added, looking up excitedly into the faces of his companions.

"I seen that great Wendigo thing," he whispered, sniffing the air about him exactly like an animal.