"You wish to know what he is like?"
The Son drew his brutish body up to its great height, his long arms swinging loose, his weak eyes focusing intently upon O'Hara's face. He was in that moment at least something more than subhuman, for a beseeching huskiness came quickly into his voice, not the piteous whine of an animal but the humility of a man.
"I wish to know what he is like," he whispered.
"He is like yourself."
The Son's jaw muscles flexed. His nostrils flared.
"He is not as large as you, or as strong as you, or as content as you," O'Hara said, "but he is more cunning, and more consciously merciless—"
"Stop that! He listens."
"—and he would destroy the one man who would lead you back into the glory of your kind, the lost glory of the fact of being man and not a soulless animal. One man alone would help you, Anstruther—"
"Stop it! Don't speak again!"
"Then you have heard of him? The word is traveling. And once the word again is on the lips of those who would be men, no power as yet conceived—"