e inn had his own individuality of swagger, his
truculent independence of mien, which suggested a man by no means
habitually used either to receive commands or to render unquestioning
obedience. Each of the men resembled his fellows in a certain flamboyant
air of ferocity, but no one of them resembled the others by wearing that
air of harmonious training with other men which links together a company
of seasoned soldiers. With their long cloaks and their large hats and
their high boots, with their somewhat shabby garments stained with age
and sweat and wine, in many places patched and in many places tattered,
with their tangled locks and ragged mustachios, the revellers had on
closer study more the appearance of brigands, or at least of guerillas,
than of regular troops. As a matter of fact, they were neither soldiers
nor brigands, though their way of life endowed them with some of the
virtues of the soldier and most of the vices of the brigand.

There was not a man in that room who lacked courage of the fiercest kind;
there was but one man in the room with intelligence enough to appreciate
the possibility of an existence uncoupled with the possession of courage
of the fiercest kind. There was not a man in the room who had the
slightest fear of death, save in so far as death meant the cessation of
those privileges of eating grossly, drinking grossly, and loving grossly,
which every man of the jack-rascals prized not a little. There was not a
man in the room that was not prepared to serve the person, whoever he
might be, who had bought his sword to strike and his body to be stricken,
so long as the buyer and the bought had agreed upon the price, and so
long as the man who carried the sword felt confident that the man who
dandled the purse meant to meet his bargain.

These were the soldierly virtues. But, further, there was not a man in
the room who would have felt the smallest compunction in cutting any
man's throat if he had full pockets, or shaming any woman's honor if she
had good looks. These were their brigand's vices. Fearless in their
conduct, filthy in their lives, the assembled rogues were as ugly a bunch
of brutalities as ever sprawled in a brothel, brawled in a tavern, or
crawled from some dark corner to cut down their unsuspicious prey.

The six fellows that sat around the wine-stained, knife-notched table of
the Inn of the Seven Devils had little in them to interest a serious
student of humanity, if such a o