He was, indeed, a strange man. When he came to what I
called my chateau, from nowhere, going nowhere, I hardly knew whether to
call him young or old. But I made my guess. That terrib le winter had
branded him. When I asked him his name, he said:
"I am a wanderer, and in wandering I have lost my name. Call me M'sieu."
I found this was a long speech for him, that his tongue was tied by a
horrible silence. When I told him where I was going, and described the
country I was going through, and that I wanted a man, he merely nodded
that he would accompany me.
We started in a canoe, and I placed him ahead of me so that I could make
out, if I could, something of what he was. His hair was dark. His beard
was dark. His eyes were sunken but strangely clear. They puzzled me. They
were always questing. Always seeking. And always expecting, it seemed to
me. A man of unfathomable mystery, of unutterable tragedy, of a silence
that was almost inhuman. Was he mad? I ask you, gentlemen--was he mad?
And I leave the answer to you. To me he was good. When I told him what
mon pere had been to me, and that I wanted to reach him before he died,
he spoke no word of hope or sympathy--but worked until his muscles
cracked. We ate together, we drank together, we slept side by side--and
it was like eating and drinking and sleeping with a sphinx which some
strange miracle had endowed with life.
The second day we entered the Sulphur Country.
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