For the first time since he had found Ezram's body—so huddled and impotent in the dead leaves—he remembered the solace of tobacco. He hunted through his pockets, found his pipe and a single tin of the weed, and began to inhale the fragrant, peace-giving smoke. When he raised his eyes again he found the girl studying him with intent gaze.
She looked away, embarrassed, and he spoke to put her at ease. "You are perfectly comfortable, Beatrice?" he asked gently.
"As good as I could expect—considering everything. I'm awfully relieved that we're off the water."
"Of course." He paused, looking away into the tremulous shadows. "Is that all? Don't you feel something else, too—a kind of satisfaction?"
The coals threw their lurid glow on her lovely, deeply tanned face. "It's for you to feel satisfaction, not me. You couldn't expect me to feel very satisfied—taken from my home—as a hostage—in a feud with my father. But I think I know what you mean. You mean—the comfort of the fire, and a place to stay."
"That's it. Of course."
"I feel it—but every human being does who has a fire when this big, northern night comes down and takes charge of things. It's just an instinct, I suppose, a comfort and a feeling of safety—and likely only the wild beasts are exempt from it." Her voice changed and softened, as her girlish fancy reached ever farther. "I suppose the first men that you were telling me about on the way out, the hairy men of long ago, felt the same way when the cold drove them to their caves for the first time. A great comfort in the protecting walls and the fire."
"It's an interesting thought—that perhaps the love of home sprang from that hour."
"Quite possibly. Perhaps it came only when they had to fight for their homes—against beasts, and such other hairy men as tried to take their homes away from them. Perhaps, after all, that's one of the great differences between men and beasts. Men have a place to live in and a place to fight for—and the fire is the symbol of it all. And the beasts run in the forest and make a new lair every day."
Thoughts of the stone age were wholly fitting in this stone-age forest, and Ben's fancy caught on fire quickly. "And perhaps, when the hairy men came to the caves to live, they forgot their wild passions they knew on the open trails—their blood-lust and their wars among themselves—and began to be men instead of beasts." Ben's voice had dropped to an even, low murmur. "Perhaps they got gentle, and the Brute died in their bodies."