e frequently the man talked to someone who was not there.

The slowness and caution with which they traveled developed Peter's
mental faculties with marvelous swiftness. His master, free of egoism
and prejudice, had placed him on a plane of intimate equality, and
Peter struggled each day to live up a little more to the responsibility
of this intimacy and confidence. Instinct, together with human
training, taught him woodcraft until in many ways he was more clever
than his master. And along with this Jolly Roger slowly but surely
impressed upon him the difference between wanton slaughter and
necessary killing.

"Everything that's got a breath of life must kill--up to a certain
point," Jolly Roger explained to him, repeating the lesson over and
over. "And that isn't wrong, Peter. The sin is in killing when you
don't have to. See that tree over there, with a vine as big as my wrist
winding around it, like a snake? Well, that vine is choking the life
out of the tree, and in time the tree will die. But the vine is doing
just what God A'mighty meant it to do. It needs a tree to live on. But
I'm going to cut the vine, because I think more of the tree than I do
the vine. That's _my_ privilege--following my conscience. And we're
eating young partridges tonight, because we had to have something to
keep us alive. It's the necessity of the thing that counts, Peter.
Think you can understand that?"

It was pretty hard for Peter at first, but he was observant, and his
mind worked quickly. The crime of destroying birdlings in their nest,
or on the ground, was impressed upon him. He began to understand there
was a certain humiliating shame attached to an attack upon a creature
weaker than himself, unless there was a reason for it. He looked
chiefly to his master for decisions in the matter. Snowshoe rabbits,
young and half grown, were very tame in this month of August, and
ordinarily he would have destroyed many of them in a day's travel. But
unless Jolly Roger gave him a signal, or he was hungry, he would pass a
snowshoe unconcernedly. This phase of Peter's development interested
Jolly Roger greatly. The outlaw's philosophy had not been punctured by
the egotistical "I am the only reasoning being" arguments of
narrow-gauged nature scientists. He believed that Peter possessed not
only a brain and super-instinct, but also a very positive reasoning
power which he was helping to develop. And the process was one that
fascinated him. When