“I brought him down, Jim.”
Involuntarily I clinch my hands.
“You little coward!” I exclaim, “it is you who should be brought down! You are too mean to live.”
He laughs brutally, and goes on, whistling indifferently, while I pick up the dead squirrel lying at my feet.
I find myself crying, before I know it. Not alone with pity for the squirrel; something else is hurting me.
“Is this the masculine nature?” I ask some one—I don’t know whom.
Perhaps it is one of those questions which are flung upward, in a blind kind of way, and which God sometimes catches and answers.
“Are they made this way? Was it meant that they should be brutal?”
I am still holding the squirrel and thinking, when I hear my name, and turning see my neighbor over the way, Mrs. Purblind’s brother, standing near me.
“Good morning, Mr. Chance,” I say, rather coldly.