And yet if it was madness. . . .
But strange things happen up there, gentlemen. I have found it sometimes
hard to define that word. There are so many kinds of madness, so many
ways in which the human brain may go wrong; and so often it happens that
what we call madness is both reasonable and just. It is so. Yes. A little
reason is good for us, a little more makes wise men of some of us--but
when our reason over-grows us and we reach too far, something breaks and
we go insane.
But I will tell you the story. That is what you want to hear, and you
expect that it will be prejudiced--that I will either deliberately
attempt to protect and prolong a human life, or shorten and destroy it. I
shall do neither, gentlemen of the Royal Mounted Police. I have a faith
in you that is in its way an unbounded as my faith in God. I have looked
up to you in all my life in the wilderness as the heart of chivalry and
the soul of honor and fairness to all men. Pathfinders, men of iron,
guardians of people and spaces of which civilization knows but little, I
have taught my children of the forests to honor, obey and to trust you.
And so I shall tell you the story without prejudice, with the gratitude
of a missioner who has lived his life for forty years in the wilderness,
gentlemen.
I am a Catholic. It is four hundred miles straight north by dog-sledge or
snowshoe to my cabin, and this is the first time in nineteen years that I
have been down to the edge of the big world which I remember now as
little more than a dream.
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