"But one evening when I reached home I found him there. My mother's face was white and she was trembling. But he was smiling! I would rather," and young Burton raised a shaking hand, "have heard another man curse than see him smile."
"I know the feeling," said Bat Scanlon. "I've felt something like it myself."
"He wanted money," proceeded the young artist. "I knew my mother had a little store somewhere, which she had put away, for the winter was coming on. He was cunning and must have divined this—it was the kind of thing she would do. When she refused, he smiled and insisted. And finally—the smile still on his mouth, remember—he struck her! I had been silent until that; but when I saw the blow fall, I became a maddened young animal. I flew at him blindly, and he beat me like a dog. A half hour later he went away, and with him went what money my mother had saved."
"Bad!" said Bat Scanlon. "Very bad!"
"And now," said the young man, "he's dead. But the evil which his life brought into the world still lives!" Oddly, his mind seemed to cling to this thought; his eyes, looking straight ahead, were filled with apprehension; his fingers picked nervously at the edge of a blanket.
"Evil is fear, and fear can be conquered," said Ashton-Kirk, quietly; "if a man wills it, he can stamp it out."
"Evil is fear!" The prisoner looked at Ashton-Kirk in sudden inquiry. "In what way?"
"In every way," replied the investigator. "No matter what its form, evil has its base in fear. And it is one of the plain offices of man to destroy this monster which has ridden him from the beginning. For when the race was young, the world was filled with unnamed dread—the darkness was peopled with unseen things. From this fear sprang superstition. The future held the first men cowed; the past had left the marks of trials and the memory of pain. And the fear of life has since made more criminals than perhaps any other thing; while dread of repeating the past has broken countless lives."
Ashton-Kirk paused for a moment, his eyes still fixed upon the young man; then he went on:
"This evil which oppresses you so has its roots in a fear, has it not?"