would be heard, a single louder word distinct and alone, or the grave
ring of a big brass tray.


III

For two years at short intervals we visited him. We came to like him,
to trust him, almost to admire him. He was plotting and preparing a war
with patience, with foresight--with a fidelity to his purpose and with
a steadfastness of which I would have thought him racially incapable.
He seemed fearless of the future, and in his plans displayed a sagacity
that was only limited by his profound ignorance of the rest of the
world. We tried to enlighten him, but our attempts to make clear the
irresistible nature of the forces which he desired to arrest failed to
discourage his eagerness to strike a blow for his own primitive ideas.
He did not understand us, and replied by arguments that almost drove
one to desperation by their childish shrewdness. He was absurd and
unanswerable. Sometimes we caught glimpses of a sombre, glowing fury
within him--a brooding and vague sense of wrong, and a concentrated lust
of violence which is dangerous in a native. He raved like one inspired.
On one occasion, after we had been talking to him late in his campong,
he jumped up. A great, clear fire blazed in the grove; lights and
shadows danced together between the trees; in the still night bats
flitted in and out of the boughs like fluttering flakes of denser
darkness. He snatched the sword from the old man, whizzed it out of the
scabbard, and thrust the point into the earth. Upon the thin, upright
blade the silver hilt, released, swayed before him like something alive.
He stepped back a pace, and in a deadened tone spoke fiercely to the
vibrating steel: "If there is virtue in the fire, in the iron, in the
hand that forged thee, in the words spoken over thee, in the desire of