Doctor Kirby, getting on his feet, and taking
a step toward the chairman. And the way he stopped and stood made
everybody look at him. Then he went on:

"Once more," he says, "I call the attention of every man present to the
fact that what the last speaker proposes is--"

And then he let 'em have that word agin, full in their faces, to think
about--

"MURDER! Merely murder."

He was bound they shouldn't get away from that word and what it stood
fur. And every man there DID think, too, fur they was another little
pause. And not one of 'em looked at another one fur a minute. Doctor
Kirby leaned forward from the platform, running his eyes over the crowd,
and jest natcherally shoved that word into the room so hard with his
mind that every mind there had to take it in.

But as he held 'em to it they come a bang from one of the windows. It
broke the charm. Fur everybody jumped. I jumped myself. When the end
of the world comes and the earth busts in the middle, it won't sound no
louder than that bang did. It was a wooden shutter. The wind was rising
outside, and it flew open and whacked agin' the building.

Then a big, heavy-set man that hadn't spoke before riz up from one of
the hind seats, like he had heard a dare to fight, and walked slowly
down toward the front. He had a red face, which was considerable
pock-marked, and very deep-set eyes, and a deep voice.

"Since when," he says, taking up his stand a dozen feet or so in front
of the doctor, "since when has any civilization refused to commit murder
when murder was necessary for its protection?"

One of the top glasses of that window was out, and with the shutter open
they come a breeze through that fluttered some strips of dirty-coloured
papers, fly-specked and dusty and spider-webbed, that hung on strings
acrost the room, jest below the ceiling. I guess they had been left over
from some Christmas doings.

"My friend," said the pock-marked man to the doctor--and the funny thing
about it was he didn't talk unfriendly when he said it--"the word you
insist on is just a WORD, like any other word."

They was a spider rousted out of his web by that disturbance among the
strings and papers. He started down from above on jest one string of
web, seemingly spinning part of it out of himself as he come, the way
they do. I couldn't keep my eyes off'n him.

"Murder," says the doctor, "is a thing."

"It is a WORD," says the other man, "FOR a thing. For a thing which
some