Bing White was not an imbecile, but he had strange fancies in that dusky treasure chamber of his, gloating over his arrowheads, whispering to himself of bloody deeds wrought and cruel blows dealt by these flints he held in his palms.
There was one long, narrow arrowhead, sharp and keen-edged, that he had a great affection for. He used to take it up lovingly and, baring his forearm, draw it lightly—lightly—close to the skin, his eyes dilating, his nostrils quivering; now and then, his hand faltering, he let it touch the flesh, and the keen edge swiftly brought blood.
At the pain he would drop the flint, but at the crimson drops which showed its bite he would gaze hungrily, delightedly, tracing them out in tiny red lines upon the white flesh of his meagre arm until the last vestige had disappeared; and then he would start and tremble, his fingers twitching strangely, his eyes peering here and there through the dusky perspective of his refuge, as if hoping to see some blur of the crimson fluid he loved. Then he would kiss the vicious arrowhead, and fondle it, until, hearing his mother's call, he would lay it down gently and flee across the joists, surefooted and nimble, to the trap-door.
By the time he descended his face would have lost the wild irradiation of his hidden joy; but his eyes followed any small creature, the cats, the chickens, the self-satisfied ducks. He whispered to himself in his dreams of a day when he would not deny his desire for blood.
A strange impish development of character was his: dangerous by reason of the stubbornness of his race, and strangely blended and nurtured with and by a love of vivid and bright color. This latter characteristic was instilled into the White blood, when one of the far-back Whites, who had been to the war, returned, bringing with him a gypsy camp-follower as his wife, making her the great-grandmother of this boy, who cherished the flint arrowheads for the pain they could inflict, and who dreamt long dreams, the atmosphere of which was crimsoned with blood and vocal with cries of pain.
This unhealthy mental state found for itself plenty of sustenance, as all vile plants and animals do, sucking the virus of its unhealthy existence from every phase of nature, every homely incident in village life. He let no chance escape him to enjoy his ghoulish pleasure; the killing of the poultry twice a week for market was a festival he never missed.
At the village shambles he was a frequent guest; at a pig-sticking he was always on hand, interested, helpful; no scientist in a clinic ever watched with greater enthusiasm the performance of a new experiment than did Bing White the bleeding of a horse—of all these events he had accurate information. If all these failed him, he sped far down the margin of the lake, to where the gillnets were, and appeased his craving by watching the slow, turgid drops that fell when they prepared the fish.
In autumn, when the paths through the ample woods were overhung with crimson canopies of leaves, which the winds brought down like blots of blood to be trodden under foot; when the brambles clung red about the fences or trailed scarlet along the ground; when the bitter-sweet hung in vermilion clusters from its bare stems, and the Virginian creeper clothed the cedars in a fiery mantle—at this time Bing White's eyes were ever gleaming with unholy happiness, only no one ever noticed it.
It is from such material as this boy that those morbid murderers are evolved who do murder for murder's sake. Just where in his ante-natal history the love of color flamed into a love of blood, who shall say? But it burned within him, a consuming fire; if quenched, to be quenched only by the annihilation of the being that embodied it. If left to burn? ...
He had much knowledge of and liking for animals, but it was the liking of the instinctive vivisector. Inexplicable cases of maimed and killed animals attested his devotion to the gratification of his curiosity. The sudden elongation and apparent telescoping of a cat's paw was a subject that for hours had kept him sleepless.