The last pot and pan had been cleaned and packed. The fire was extinguished. Brown issued his first order of the deed.
"Lie down flat in the grass now."
The men dropped one by one. Brown was the last.
"When I give the word, see that your arms are in trim and march single file fifty yards apart and beat the brush as you go. If you come on a cabin in our path not marked in our survey, it is important. Do not pass it. Report to me immediately."
There was no response. He had expected none. The order was final.
The first move in the man hunt was carefully planned.
The instinct to kill is the elemental force, beneath our culture, which makes the hunter. The strongest personalities of our world-conquering race of Nordic freemen are always hunters. If they do not practice the chase the fact is due to an accident of position in life. The opportunity has not been given.
Beneath the skin of the man of the College, the Council Table, the Forum, the Sacred Altar, of Home, and the Church slumbers this elemental beast.
Culture at best is but a few hundred years old and it has probably skipped several generations in its growth. The Archaic instinct in man to kill reaches back millions of years into the past. The only power on earth to restrain that force is Law. The rules of life, embodied in law are the painful results of experience in killing and the dire effects which follow, both to the individual and the race. Law is a force only so long as reverence for law is made the first principle of man's social training. The moment he lifts his individual will against the embodied experience of humanity, he is once more the elemental beast of the prehistoric jungle—the Hunter.
And when the game is human and the hunter is a man of prayer, we have the supreme form of the beast, the ancient Witch Hunter. It is a fact that the pleasure of killing is universal in man. Our savage ancestors for millions of years had to kill to live. We have long ago outgrown this necessity in the development of civilization. But the instinct remains.