



Produced by Espen Ore, Steve Henshaw, and Andrew Sly









MOON-FACE AND OTHER STORIES

By Jack London



CONTENTS

     MOON-FACE
     THE LEOPARD MAN'S STORY
     LOCAL COLOR
     AMATEUR NIGHT
     THE MINIONS OF MIDAS
     THE SHADOW AND THE FLASH
     ALL GOLD CANYON
     PLANCHETTE




MOON-FACE


John Claverhouse was a moon-faced man. You know the kind, cheek-bones
wide apart, chin and forehead melting into the cheeks to complete the
perfect round, and the nose, broad and pudgy, equidistant from the
circumference, flattened against the very centre of the face like a
dough-ball upon the ceiling. Perhaps that is why I hated him, for truly
he had become an offense to my eyes, and I believed the earth to
be cumbered with his presence. Perhaps my mother may have been
superstitious of the moon and looked upon it over the wrong shoulder at
the wrong time.

Be that as it may, I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me
what society would consider a wrong or an ill turn. Far from it. The
evil was of a deeper, subtler sort; so elusive, so intangible, as to
defy clear, definite analysis in words. We all experience such things
at some period in our lives. For the first time we see a certain
individual, one who the very instant before we did not dream existed;
and yet, at the first moment of meeting, we say: "I do not like that
man." Why do we not like him? Ah, we do not know why; we know only that
we do not. We have taken a dislike, that is all. And so I with John
Claverhouse.

What right had such a man to be happy? Yet he was an optimist. He was
always gleeful and laughing. All things were always all right, curse
him! Ah I how it grated on my soul that he should be so happy! Other
men could laugh, and it did not bother me. I even used to laugh
myself--before I met John Claverhouse.

But his laugh! It irritated me, maddened me, as nothing else under the
sun could irritate or madden me. It haunted me, gripped hold of me, and
would not let me go. It was a huge, Gargantuan laugh. Waking or sleeping
it was always with me, whirring and jarring across my heart-strings like
an enormous rasp. At break of day it came whooping across the fields to
spoil my pleasant morning revery. Under the aching noonday glare, when
the green things drooped and the birds withdrew to the depths of the
forest, and all nature drowsed, his great "Ha! ha!" and "Ho! ho!" rose
up to the sky and challenged the sun. And at black midnight, from the
lonely cross-roads where he turned from town into his own place, came
his plaguey cachinnations to rouse me from my sleep and make me writhe
and clench my nails into my palms.

I went forth privily in the night-time, and turned his cattle into his
fields, and in the morning heard his whooping laugh as he drove them out
again. "It is nothing," he said; "the poor, dumb beasties are not to be
blamed for straying into fatter pastures."

He had a dog he called "Mars," a big, splendid brute, part deer-hound
and part blood-hound, and resembling both. Mars was a great delight to
him, and they were always together. But I bided my time, and one day,
when opportunity was ripe, lured the animal away and settled for him
with strychnine and beefsteak. It made positively no impression on John
Claverhouse. His laugh was as hearty and frequent as ever, and his face
as much like the full moon as it always had been.

Then I set fire to his haystacks and his barn. But the next morning,
being Sunday, he went forth blithe and cheerful.

"Where are you going?" I asked him, as he went by the cross-roads.

"Trout," he said, and his face beamed like a full moon. "I just dote on
trout."

Was there ever such an impossible man! His whole harvest had gone up in
his haystacks and barn. It was uninsured, I knew. And yet, in the face
of famine and the rigorous winter, he went out gayly in quest of a mess
of trout, forsooth, because he "doted" on them! Had gloom but rested,
no matter how lightly, on his brow, or had his bovine countenance grown
long and serious and less like the moon, or had he removed that smile
but once from off his face, I am sure I could have forgiven him for
existing. But no, he grew only more cheerful under misfortune.

I insulted him. He looked at me in slow and smiling surprise.

"I fight you? Why?" he asked slowly. And then he laughed. "You are so
funny! Ho! ho! You'll be the death of me! He! he! he! Oh! Ho! ho! ho!"

What would you? It was past endurance. By the blood of Judas, how I
hated him! Then there was that name--Claverhouse! What a name! Wasn't it
absurd? Claverhouse! Merciful heaven, WHY Claverhouse? Again and again I
asked myself that question. I should not have minded Smith, or Brown,
or Jones--but CLAVERHOUSE! I leave it to you. Repeat it to
yourself--Claverhouse. Just listen to the ridiculous sound of
it--Claverhouse! Should a man live with such a name? I ask of you. "No,"
you say. And "No" said I.

But I bethought me of his mortgage. What of his crops and barn
destroyed, I knew he would be unable to meet it. So I got a shrewd,
close-mouthed, tight-fisted money-lender to get the mortgage
transferred to him. I did not appear but through this agent I forced
the foreclosure, and but few days (no more, believe me, than the law
allowed) were given John Claverhouse to remove his goods and chattels
from the premises. Then I strolled down to see how he took it, for
he had lived there upward of twenty years. But he met me with his
saucer-eyes twinkling, and the light glowing and spreading in his face
till it was as a full-risen moon.

"Ha! ha! ha!" he laughed. "The funniest tike, that youngster of mine!
Did you ever hear the like? Let me tell you. He was down playing by the
edge of the river when a piece of the bank caved in and splashed him. 'O
papa!' he cried; 'a great big puddle flewed up and hit me.'"

He stopped and waited for me to join him in his infernal glee.

"I don't see any laugh in it," I said shortly, and I know my face went
sour.

He regarded me with wonderment, and then came the damnable light,
glowing and spreading, as I have described it, till his face shone soft
and warm, like the summer moon, and then the laugh--"Ha! ha! That's
funny! You don't see it, eh? He! he! Ho! ho! ho! He doesn't see it! Why,
look here. You know a puddle--"

But I turned on my heel and left him. That was the last. I could stand
it no longer. The thing must end right there, I thought, curse him! The
earth should be quit of him. And as I went over the hill, I could hear
his monstrous laugh reverberating against the sky.

Now, I pride myself on doing things neatly, and when I resolved to kill
John Claverhouse I had it in mind to do so in such fashion that I should
not look back upon it and feel ashamed. I hate bungling, and I hate
brutality. To me there is something repugnant in merely striking a man
with one's naked fist--faugh! it is sickening! So, to shoot, or stab,
or club John Claverhouse (oh, that name!) did not appeal to me. And not
only was I impelled to do it neatly and artistically, but also in such
manner that not the slightest possible suspicion could be directed
against me.

To this end I bent my intellect, and, after a week of profound
incubation, I hatched the scheme. Then I set to work. I bought a water
spaniel bitch, five months old, and devoted my whole attention to her
training. Had any one spied upon me, they would have remarked that this
training consisted entirely of one thing--RETRIEVING. I taught the dog,
which I called "Bellona," to fetch sticks I threw into the water, and
not only to fetch, but to fetch at once, without mouthing or playing
with them. The point was that she was to stop for nothing, but to
deliver the stick in all haste. I made a practice of running away and
leaving her to chase me, with the stick in her mouth, till she caught
me. She was a bright animal, and took to the game with such eagerness
that I was soon content.

After that, at the first casual opportunity, I presented Bellona to
John Claverhouse. I knew what I was about, for I was aware of a little
weakness of his, and of a little private sinning of which he was
regularly and inveterately guilty.

"No," he said, when I placed the end of the rope in his hand. "No, you
don't mean it." And his mouth opened wide and he grinned all over his
damnable moon-face.

"I--I kind of thought, somehow, you didn't like me," he explained.
"Wasn't it funny for me to make such a mistake?" And at the thought he
held his sides with laughter.

"What is her name?" he managed to ask between paroxysms.

"Bellona," I said.

"He! he!" he tittered. "What a funny name."

I gritted my teeth, for his mirth put them on edge, and snapped out
between them, "She was the wife of Mars, you know."

Then the light of the full moon began to suffuse his face, until he
exploded with: "That was my other dog. Well, I guess she's a widow now.
Oh! Ho! ho! E! he! he! Ho!" he whooped after me, and I turned and fled
swiftly over the hill.

The week passed by, and on Saturday evening I said to him, "You go away
Monday, don't you?"

He nodded his head and grinned.

"Then you won't have another chance to get a mess of those trout you
just 'dote' on."

But he did not notice the sneer. "Oh, I don't know," he chuckled. "I'm
going up to-morrow to try pretty hard."

Thus was assurance made doubly sure, and I went back to my house hugging
myself with rapture.

Early next morning I saw him go by with a dip-net and gunnysack, and
Bellona trotting at his heels. I knew where he was bound, and cut out
by the back pasture and climbed through the underbrush to the top of the
mountain. Keeping carefully out of sight, I followed the crest along
for a couple of miles to a natural amphitheatre in the hills, where the
little river raced down out of a gorge and stopped for breath in a large
and placid rock-bound pool. That was the spot! I sat down on the croup
of the mountain, where I could see all that occurred, and lighted my
pipe.

Ere many minutes had passed, John Claverhouse came plodding up the bed
of the stream. Bellona was ambling about him, and they were in high
feather, her short, snappy barks mingling with his deeper chest-notes.
Arrived at the pool, he threw down the dip-net and sack, and drew from
his hip-pocket what looked like a large, fat candle. But I knew it to
be a stick of "giant"; for such was his method of catching trout. He
dynamited them. He attached the fuse by wrapping the "giant" tightly
in a piece of cotton. Then he ignited the fuse and tossed the explosive
into the pool.

Like a flash, Bellona was into the pool after it. I could have shrieked
aloud for joy. Claverhouse yelled at her, but without avail. He pelted
her with clods and rocks, but she swam steadily on till she got the
stick of "giant" in her mouth, when she whirled about and headed for
shore. Then, for the first time, he realized his danger, and started to
run. As foreseen and planned by me, she made the bank and took out after
him. Oh, I tell you, it was great! As I have said, the pool lay in a
sort of amphitheatre. Above and below, the stream could be crossed
on stepping-stones. And around and around, up and down and across the
stones, raced Claverhouse and Bellona. I could never have believed
that such an ungainly man could run so fast. But run he did, Bellona
hot-footed after him, and gaining. And then, just as she caught up,
he in full stride, and she leaping with nose at his knee, there was a
sudden flash, a burst of smoke, a terrific detonation, and where man and
dog had been the instant before there was naught to be seen but a big
hole in the ground.

"Death from accident while engaged in illegal fishing." That was the
verdict of the coroner's jury; and that is why I pride myself on the
neat and artistic way in which I finished off John Claverhouse. There
was no bungling, no brutality; nothing of which to be ashamed in
the whole transaction, as I am sure you will agree. No more does his
infernal laugh go echoing among the hills, and no more does his fat
moon-face rise up to vex me. My days are peaceful now, and my night's
sleep deep.




THE LEOPARD MAN'S STORY


He had a dreamy, far-away look in his eyes, and his sad, insistent
voice, gentle-spoken as a maid's, seemed the placid embodiment of some
deep-seated melancholy. He was the Leopard Man, but he did not look
it. His business in life, whereby he lived, was to appear in a cage of
performing leopards before vast audiences, and to thrill those audiences
by certain exhibitions of nerve for which his employers rewarded him on
a scale commensurate with the thrills he produced.

As I say, he did not look it. He was narrow-hipped, narrow-shouldered,
and anaemic, while he seemed not so much oppressed by gloom as by a
sweet and gentle sadness, the weight of which was as sweetly and gently
borne. For an hour I had been trying to get a story out of him, but
he appeared to lack imagination. To him there was no romance in his
gorgeous career, no deeds of daring, no thrills--nothing but a gray
sameness and infinite boredom.

Lions? Oh, yes! he had fought with them. It was nothing. All you had to
do was to stay sober. Anybody could whip a lion to a standstill with an
ordinary stick. He had fought one for half an hour once. Just hit him
on the nose every time he rushed, and when he got artful and rushed with
his head down, why, the thing to do was to stick out your leg. When he
grabbed at the leg you drew it back and hit hint on the nose again. That
was all.

With the far-away look in his eyes and his soft flow of words he showed
me his scars. There were many of them, and one recent one where a
tigress had reached for his shoulder and gone down to the bone. I could
see the neatly mended rents in the coat he had on. His right arm,
from the elbow down, looked as though it had gone through a threshing
machine, what of the ravage wrought by claws and fangs. But it was
nothing, he said, only the old wounds bothered him somewhat when rainy
weather came on.

Suddenly his face brightened with a recollection, for he was really as
anxious to give me a story as I was to get it.

"I suppose you've heard of the lion-tamer who was hated by another man?"
he asked.

He paused and looked pensively at a sick lion in the cage opposite.

"Got the toothache," he explained. "Well, the lion-tamer's big play to
the audience was putting his head in a lion's mouth. The man who hated
him attended every performance in the hope sometime of seeing that lion
crunch down. He followed the show about all over the country. The years
went by and he grew old, and the lion-tamer grew old, and the lion grew
old. And at last one day, sitting in a front seat, he saw what he had
waited for. The lion crunched down, and there wasn't any need to call a
doctor."

The Leopard Man glanced casually over his finger nails in a manner which
would have been critical had it not been so sad.

"Now, that's what I call patience," he continued, "and it's my style.
But it was not the style of a fellow I knew. He was a little, thin,
sawed-off, sword-swallowing and juggling Frenchman. De Ville, he called
himself, and he had a nice wife. She did trapeze work and used to dive
from under the roof into a net, turning over once on the way as nice as
you please.

"De Ville had a quick temper, as quick as his hand, and his hand was as
quick as the paw of a tiger. One day, because the ring-master called him
a frog-eater, or something like that and maybe a little worse, he shoved
him against the soft pine background he used in his knife-throwing act,
so quick the ring-master didn't have time to think, and there, before
the audience, De Ville kept the air on fire with his knives, sinking
them into the wood all around the ring-master so close that they passed
through his clothes and most of them bit into his skin.

"The clowns had to pull the knives out to get him loose, for he was
pinned fast. So the word went around to watch out for De Ville, and no
one dared be more than barely civil to his wife. And she was a sly bit
of baggage, too, only all hands were afraid of De Ville.

"But there was one man, Wallace, who was afraid of nothing. He was the
lion-tamer, and he had the self-same trick of putting his head into
the lion's mouth. He'd put it into the mouths of any of them, though
he preferred Augustus, a big, good-natured beast who could always be
depended upon.

"As I was saying, Wallace--'King' Wallace we called him--was afraid
of nothing alive or dead. He was a king and no mistake. I've seen him
drunk, and on a wager go into the cage of a lion that'd turned nasty,
and without a stick beat him to a finish. Just did it with his fist on
the nose.

"Madame de Ville--"

At an uproar behind us the Leopard Man turned quietly around. It was
a divided cage, and a monkey, poking through the bars and around the
partition, had had its paw seized by a big gray wolf who was trying to
pull it off by main strength. The arm seemed stretching out longer end
longer like a thick elastic, and the unfortunate monkey's mates were
raising a terrible din. No keeper was at hand, so the Leopard Man
stepped over a couple of paces, dealt the wolf a sharp blow on the nose
with the light cane he carried, and returned with a sadly apologetic
smile to take up his unfinished sentence as though there had been no
interruption.

"--looked at King Wallace and King Wallace looked at her, while De Ville
looked black. We warned Wallace, but it was no use. He laughed at us,
as he laughed at De Ville one day when he shoved De Ville's head into a
bucket of paste because he wanted to fight.

"De Ville was in a pretty mess--I helped to scrape him off; but he was
cool as a cucumber and made no threats at all. But I saw a glitter in
his eyes which I had seen often in the eyes of wild beasts, and I went
out of my way to give Wallace a final warning. He laughed, but he did
not look so much in Madame de Ville's direction after that.

"Several months passed by. Nothing had happened and I was beginning to
think it all a scare over nothing. We were West by that time, showing in
'Frisco. It was during the afternoon performance, and the big tent was
filled with women and children, when I went looking for Red Denny, the
head canvas-man, who had walked off with my pocket-knife.

"Passing by one of the dressing tents I glanced in through a hole in the
canvas to see if I could locate him. He wasn't there, but directly in
front of me was King Wallace, in tights, waiting for his turn to go on
with his cage of performing lions. He was watching with much amusement a
quarrel between a couple of trapeze artists. All the rest of the people
in the dressing tent were watching the same thing, with the exception
of De Ville whom I noticed staring at Wallace with undisguised hatred.
Wallace and the rest were all too busy following the quarrel to notice
this or what followed.

"But I saw it through the hole in the canvas. De Ville drew his
handkerchief from his pocket, made as though to mop the sweat from
his face with it (it was a hot day), and at the same time walked past
Wallace's back. The look troubled me at the time, for not only did I see
hatred in it, but I saw triumph as well.

"'De Ville will bear watching,' I said to myself, and I really breathed
easier when I saw him go out the entrance to the circus grounds and
board an electric car for down town. A few minutes later I was in the
big tent, where I had overhauled Red Denny. King Wallace was doing
his turn and holding the audience spellbound. He was in a particularly
vicious mood, and he kept the lions stirred up till they were all
snarling, that is, all of them except old Augustus, and he was just too
fat and lazy and old to get stirred up over anything.

"Finally Wallace cracked the old lion's knees with his whip and got him
into position. Old Augustus, blinking good-naturedly, opened his mouth
and in popped Wallace's head. Then the jaws came together, CRUNCH, just
like that."

The Leopard Man smiled in a sweetly wistful fashion, and the far-away
look came into his eyes.

"And that was the end of King Wallace," he went on in his sad, low
voice. "After the excitement cooled down I watched my chance and bent
over and smelled Wallace's head. Then I sneezed."

"It... it was...?" I queried with halting eagerness.

"Snuff--that De Ville dropped on his hair in the dressing tent. Old
Augustus never meant to do it. He only sneezed."




LOCAL COLOR


"I do not see why you should not turn this immense amount of unusual
information to account," I told him. "Unlike most men equipped with
similar knowledge, YOU have expression. Your style is--"

"Is sufficiently--er--journalese?" he interrupted suavely.

"Precisely! You could turn a pretty penny."

But he interlocked his fingers meditatively, shrugged his shoulders, and
dismissed the subject.

"I have tried it. It does not pay."

"It was paid for and published," he added, after a pause. "And I was
also honored with sixty days in the Hobo."

"The Hobo?" I ventured.

"The Hobo--" He fixed his eyes on my Spencer and ran along the titles
while he cast his definition. "The Hobo, my dear fellow, is the name for
that particular place of detention in city and county jails wherein are
assembled tramps, drunks, beggars, and the riff-raff of petty offenders.
The word itself is a pretty one, and it has a history. Hautbois--there's
the French of it. Haut, meaning high, and bois, wood. In English
it becomes hautboy, a wooden musical instrument of two-foot tone, I
believe, played with a double reed, an oboe, in fact. You remember in
'Henry IV'--

    "'The case of a treble hautboy
     Was a mansion for him, a court.'

"From this to ho-boy is but a step, and for that matter the English
used the terms interchangeably. But--and mark you, the leap paralyzes
one--crossing the Western Ocean, in New York City, hautboy, or ho-boy,
becomes the name by which the night-scavenger is known. In a way one
understands its being born of the contempt for wandering players and
musical fellows. But see the beauty of it! the burn and the brand!
The night-scavenger, the pariah, the miserable, the despised, the man
without caste! And in its next incarnation, consistently and logically,
it attaches itself to the American outcast, namely, the tramp. Then,
as others have mutilated its sense, the tramp mutilates its form, and
ho-boy becomes exultantly hobo. Wherefore, the large stone and brick
cells, lined with double and triple-tiered bunks, in which the Law is
wont to incarcerate him, he calls the Hobo. Interesting, isn't it?"

And I sat back and marvelled secretly at this encyclopaedic-minded man,
this Leith Clay-Randolph, this common tramp who made himself at home in
my den, charmed such friends as gathered at my small table, outshone me
with his brilliance and his manners, spent my spending money, smoked my
best cigars, and selected from my ties and studs with a cultivated and
discriminating eye.

He absently walked over to the shelves and looked into Loria's "Economic
Foundation of Society."

"I like to talk with you," he remarked. "You are not indifferently
schooled. You've read the books, and your economic interpretation of
history, as you choose to call it" (this with a sneer), "eminently fits
you for an intellectual outlook on life. But your sociologic judgments
are vitiated by your lack of practical knowledge. Now I, who know the
books, pardon me, somewhat better than you, know life, too. I have lived
it, naked, taken it up in both my hands and looked at it, and tasted it,
the flesh and the blood of it, and, being purely an intellectual, I have
been biased by neither passion nor prejudice. All of which is necessary
for clear concepts, and all of which you lack. Ah! a really clever
passage. Listen!"

And he read aloud to me in his remarkable style, paralleling the text
with a running criticism and commentary, lucidly wording involved and
lumbering periods, casting side and cross lights upon the subject,
introducing points the author had blundered past and objections he had
ignored, catching up lost ends, flinging a contrast into a paradox
and reducing it to a coherent and succinctly stated truth--in short,
flashing his luminous genius in a blaze of fire over pages erstwhile
dull and heavy and lifeless.

It is long since that Leith Clay-Randolph (note the hyphenated surname)
knocked at the back door of Idlewild and melted the heart of Gunda. Now
Gunda was cold as her Norway hills, though in her least frigid moods she
was capable of permitting especially nice-looking tramps to sit on the
back stoop and devour lone crusts and forlorn and forsaken chops. But
that a tatterdemalion out of the night should invade the sanctity of her
kitchen-kingdom and delay dinner while she set a place for him in the
warmest corner, was a matter of such moment that the Sunflower went
to see. Ah, the Sunflower, of the soft heart and swift sympathy! Leith
Clay-Randolph threw his glamour over her for fifteen long minutes,
whilst I brooded with my cigar, and then she fluttered back with vague
words and the suggestion of a cast-off suit I would never miss.

"Surely I shall never miss it," I said, and I had in mind the dark gray
suit with the pockets draggled from the freightage of many books--books
that had spoiled more than one day's fishing sport.

"I should advise you, however," I added, "to mend the pockets first."

But the Sunflower's face clouded. "N--o," she said, "the black one."

"The black one!" This explosively, incredulously. "I wear it quite
often. I--I intended wearing it to-night."

"You have two better ones, and you know I never liked it, dear," the
Sunflower hurried on. "Besides, it's shiny--"

"Shiny!"

"It--it soon will be, which is just the same, and the man is really
estimable. He is nice and refined, and I am sure he--"

"Has seen better days."

"Yes, and the weather is raw and beastly, and his clothes are
threadbare. And you have many suits--"

"Five," I corrected, "counting in the dark gray fishing outfit with the
draggled pockets."

"And he has none, no home, nothing--"

"Not even a Sunflower,"--putting my arm around her,--"wherefore he is
deserving of all things. Give him the black suit, dear--nay, the best
one, the very best one. Under high heaven for such lack there must be
compensation!"

"You ARE a dear!" And the Sunflower moved to the door and looked back
alluringly. "You are a PERFECT dear."

And this after seven years, I marvelled, till she was back again, timid
and apologetic.

"I--I gave him one of your white shirts. He wore a cheap horrid cotton
thing, and I knew it would look ridiculous. And then his shoes were so
slipshod, I let him have a pair of yours, the old ones with the narrow
caps--"

"Old ones!"

"Well, they pinched horribly, and you know they did."

It was ever thus the Sunflower vindicated things.

And so Leith Clay-Randolph came to Idlewild to stay, how long I did
not dream. Nor did I dream how often he was to come, for he was like an
erratic comet. Fresh he would arrive, and cleanly clad, from grand folk
who were his friends as I was his friend, and again, weary and worn,
he would creep up the brier-rose path from the Montanas or Mexico. And
without a word, when his wanderlust gripped him, he was off and away
into that great mysterious underworld he called "The Road."

"I could not bring myself to leave until I had thanked you, you of the
open hand and heart," he said, on the night he donned my good black
suit.

And I confess I was startled when I glanced over the top of my paper and
saw a lofty-browed and eminently respectable-looking gentleman, boldly
and carelessly at ease. The Sunflower was right. He must have known
better days for the black suit and white shirt to have effected such a
transformation. Involuntarily I rose to my feet, prompted to meet him on
equal ground. And then it was that the Clay-Randolph glamour descended
upon me. He slept at Idlewild that night, and the next night, and for
many nights. And he was a man to love. The Son of Anak, otherwise Rufus
the Blue-Eyed, and also plebeianly known as Tots, rioted with him from
brier-rose path to farthest orchard, scalped him in the haymow with
barbaric yells, and once, with pharisaic zeal, was near to crucifying
him under the attic roof beams. The Sunflower would have loved him
for the Son of Anak's sake, had she not loved him for his own. As for
myself, let the Sunflower tell, in the times he elected to be gone,
of how often I wondered when Leith would come back again, Leith the
Lovable. Yet he was a man of whom we knew nothing. Beyond the fact that
he was Kentucky-born, his past was a blank. He never spoke of it. And
he was a man who prided himself upon his utter divorce of reason from
emotion. To him the world spelled itself out in problems. I charged him
once with being guilty of emotion when roaring round the den with
the Son of Anak pickaback. Not so, he held. Could he not cuddle a
sense-delight for the problem's sake?

He