res that more and more
stirred their admiration--and horror. Working upon fragments of fact
that from day to day had been printed in the _Eagle_, he built a
structure of sacrifice and slaughter from which he alone arose supreme.
It was a dramatic dissertation and contained red-blooded sentiments that
would have done credit to a man who had actually played the giant game,
swapped trick for trick with death, and won out by sheer luck.

Curiously enough, he believed himself; he believed that his moment of
weakness earlier in the day had now passed into the limbo of things
never to be resurrected; he believed that his courage was absolute, that
no terrors were great enough to shake it. The ancient Egyptians brought
a skeleton to their feasts to remind them of death, but Jeb's apparent
familiarity with carnage seemed to be giving him new life.

A man may think he possesses a determined belief, yet unless he has
energy and faith enough to test it he is harboring little more than a
wish, a hope. If he is downright honest he will not permit himself to be
deceived--but the trouble is that hopes which he wishes were beliefs,
and wishes that he hopes will become beliefs, are blindfolds
deliberately placed across his eyes to spare him an unrestricted vision
of his naked soul. This is the most common type of cowardice in the
world.

The brave words Jeb uttered were most agreeable to his senses; they fed
the hole that should have been filled with courage, and he therefore
plunged onward into the realm of imageries until the little ladies felt
that they had never really known their Jeb. Certain were they that his
manliness had received a most inadequate appreciation.

Dinner over, he left them for the quietude of the garden. Back and forth
upon the path, bordered by wee budding tulips, he walked with springing
steps. His gaze was in the laced branches overhead, a tangle that broke
the calm flood of moonlight into silver patches and scattered them over
the ground. Back and forth across these he strode--one moment in sharp
outline, the next obscured--thinking, dreaming. He would not stop to
hear the unspoken message of this place, whispering to him everywhere
that the intricate mesh of branches represented Fear, through which the
pulseless courage shed upon man from God is shattered. He would not see,
in the tiny green tips pushing through the earth, that man's blooming
into perfection is a slow process, dependent upon the cultivatio