ncy came, and again the awful thought
seized him, and again he reflected upon the man outside. Suppose,
instead of wearing the semblance of humanity, he had worn the semblance
of a beast, then his course would have been clear enough. Suppose it
were a hungry wolf watching out there, instead of a man, and this man
was worse than any wolf. He was like the weir-wolf of the old
Scandinavian legend. He had all the cowardly cruelty of a wolf, he was a
means of evil, but he had the trained brain of a man.

Gordon thought he heard footsteps, and the man made a very slight
motion. Gordon thought joyfully that Aaron had left the balky mare, and
had returned, but it was not so. He had heard nothing except the
pulsations of the blood in his own overwrought brain.

He wondered if he were really going mad, although all the time his mind
was steadily at work upon the awful problem which had been forced upon
it. Should any power for evil be allowed to exist upon the earth if
mortal man had strength to stamp it out? Suppose that was a poisonous
snake out there, and not a man. What was out there was worse than any
snake. Gordon reasoned as the first man in Eden may have reasoned; and
he did not know whether his reasoning were right or wrong. Meantime, the
danger increased every moment. Of one thing he was perfectly sure: he
had no personal motive for what he might or might not do. He had reached
that pass when he was himself, as far as he himself was concerned,
beyond hate of that man outside. It was a principle for which he argued.
Should a monster, something abnormal in strength and subtlety and
wickedness, something which menaced all the good in the world, be
allowed to exist? Gordon argued that it should not. He was driven to it
by years of fruitless struggling against this monstrous creation in the
shape of man. He had seen such suffering because of him; his whole life
had been so turned and twisted this way and that way because of him,
that he himself had in the end become abnormal, and mentally askew, with
the system of things. He was conscious of it himself. He had been
naturally a good, simple, broad-visioned man, full of charity, with
almost no subtlety. He had been forced to lead a life which strained and
diverted all these good traits. Where he would have been open, he had
been secret. Where he would have had no suspicion of any one, his first
sight now seemed to be for ulterior motives. He weighed and measured
where he natu