THE PROBLEM.
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at my post, and for fear the moans of even this reptile humanity might move me too much, I shook his clenched grip violently off and started hastily for the Rancho. His voice followed me—as 1 struggled through the dense brush—for some distance. The creature's feeble wits had been temporarily addled by the night's work. Hideous as portions of it had been, and painful as those sounds were, I remember—just as they were dying away—that I burst into a hearty laugh as the ludicrous contrast presented itself of valiant Sir Braggadocio Antone, in the glory of one of his boasting feats, and the writhing, pitiable thing I had just left. The nerves, when unstrung through scenes like these, grow unnaturally impressible, and vibrate to strange humors. One feels sometimes as though he would laugh though tottering on the sheer brink of some red shaft to Tartarus. Curious problem ! —this monstrous trinity, Man—part fiend, part angel, and part brute.
It would require a strong reliance upon the evidence of things unseen, to suppose any part of him could be developed in such a life as that on this frontier, other than his fiend and brute natures.