xcept for the heat, perhaps in a
measure for the silence, I wouldn't have known them at all. I got to
thinking about last night's crime, and I couldn't get it out of mind.
The conceptions I had formed of it, the theories and decisions, seemed
less and less convincing as I sat overlooking those shadowed, silent
grounds. So much depends on the point of view. Ordinarily, our will
gives us strength to believe wholly what we want to believe and nothing
else. But the powers of the will were unstable to-night, the whole seat
of being was shaken, and my fine theories in regard to Pescini seemed to
lack the stuff of truth. I suppose every man present provided some
satisfactory theory to fit the facts, for no other reason than that we
didn't want to change our conception of Things as They Are. Such a
course was essential to our own self-comfort and security. But my
Pescini theory seemed far-fetched. In that silence and that heat,
anything could be true at Kastle Krags!

From this point my mind led logically to the most disquieting and
fearful thing of all. What was to prevent last night's crime from
recurring?

It isn't hard to see the basis for such a thought. Some way, in these
last, stifling, almost maddening hours, it had become difficult to rely
implicitly on our rational interpretation of things. Certain things are
credible to the every-day man in the every-day mood--things such as
aeronautics and wireless, that to a savage mind would seem a thousand
times more incredible than mere witchcraft and magic--and certain things
simply can not and will not be believed. Society itself, our laws, our
customs, our basic attitude towards life depends on a fine balance of
what is credible and what is not, an imperious disbelief in any
manifestation out of the common run of things. It is altogether good for
society when this can be so. Men can not rise up from savagery until it
is so. As long as black magic and witchcraft haunt the souls of men,
there is nothing to trust, nothing to hold to or build towards, nothing
permanent or infallible on which to rely, and hope can not escape from
fear, and there is no promise that to-day's work will stand till
to-morrow. Men are far happier when they may master their own beliefs.
There is nothing so destructive to happiness, so favorable to the
dominion of Fear, as an indiscriminate credulity. Those African
explorers who have seen the curse of fear in the Congo tribes need not
be told this fact.