t flickering of intelligence, a good-natured
brute with the strength and mental caliber of a gorilla. His hand
pressed heavily upon me, and I knew the weight of the muscles behind.
I looked at the other brutes, two of them unperturbed and incurious,
and one of them that gloated over the spectacle; and my reason came
back to me, my muscles relaxed, and I sank down in the grass.

My mind went back to the two maiden ladies with whom I had had
breakfast that morning. Less than two miles, as the crow flies,
separated them from this scene. Here, in the windless day, under a
beneficent sun, was a sister of theirs being beaten by a brother of
mine. Here was a page of life they could never see--and better so,
though for lack of seeing they would never be able to understand their
sisterhood, nor themselves, nor know the clay of which they were made.
For it is not given to woman to live in sweet-scented, narrow rooms
and at the same time be a little sister to all the world.

The whipping was finished, and the woman, no longer screaming, went
back to her seat in the wagon. Nor did the other women come to
her--just then. They were afraid. But they came afterward, when a
decent interval had elapsed. The man put the whip away and rejoined
us, flinging himself down on the other side of me. He was breathing
hard from his exertions. He wiped the sweat from his eyes on his
coat-sleeve, and looked challengingly at me. I returned his look
carelessly; what he had done was no concern of mine. I did not go away
abruptly. I lay there half an hour longer, which, under the
circumstances, was tact and etiquette. I rolled cigarettes from
tobacco I borrowed from them, and when I slipped down the bank to the
railroad, I was equipped with the necessary information for catching
the next freight bound south.

Well, and what of it? It was a page out of life, that's all; and there
are many pages worse, far worse, that I have seen. I have sometimes
held forth (facetiously, so my listeners believed) that the chief
distinguishing trait between man and the other animals is that man is
the only animal that maltreats the females of his kind. It is
something of which no wolf nor cowardly coyote is ever guilty. It is
something that even the dog, degenerated by domestication, will not
do. The dog still retains the wild instinct in this matter, while man
has lost most of his wild instincts--at least, most of the good ones.

Worse pages of life than what I have