We are human as we restrain this instinct and bring it under the dominion of Law. We still hunt the most delicate and beautiful animals, stalk and kill them, driven by the passionate secret pleasure of the act of murder. With bated breath and glittering eyes we press our advantage until the broken wing ceases to flutter and the splintered bone to crawl.
This imperious atavism the best of us cannot or will not control in the pursuit of animals. When man has lifted his arm in defiance of Tradition and Law, this impulse is the dominant force which sweeps all else as chaff before it.
John Brown was the apostle of the sternest faith ever developed in the agonies of our history. To him life had always been a horror.
There was no hesitation, no halting, no quiver of maudlin pity, when he slowly rose from his grass-covered lair in the darkness and called his men at ten o'clock:
"Ready!"
Single file, moving silently and swiftly they crept through the night, only the sharpened swords clanking occasionally broke the silence. Their tread was soft as the claws of panthers. The leader's spirit gripped mind and body of his followers.
They moved northward from the camp in the ravine and crossed the Mosquito Creek just above the home of the Doyles. Once over the creek, the hunters again spread out single file fifty yards apart.
They had gone but two hundred yards when the signal to halt was whispered along the line. Owen Brown reported to his father:
"There's a cabin just ahead."
"We haven't charted it in our survey?"