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.