 more than once to exclaim, He nearly slipped from me there. I could
not make him out. Who was he? And after glaring at me wildly he would go on,
jubilating and sneering. To me the conversation of these two across the creek
appears now as the deadliest kind of duel on which Fate looked on with her
cold-eyed knowledge of the end. No, he didn't turn Jim's soul inside out, but I
am much mistaken if the spirit so utterly out of his reach had not been made to
taste to the full the bitterness of that contest. These were the emissaries with
whom the world he had renounced was pursuing him in his retreat - white men from
out there where he did not think himself good enough to live. This was all that
came to him - a menace, a shock, a danger to his work. I suppose it is this sad,
half-resentful, half-resigned feeling, piercing through the few words Jim said
now and then, that puzzled Brown so much in the reading of his character. Some
great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they
destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their
work, and Brown, as though he had been really great, had a satanic gift of
finding out the best and the weakest spot in his victims. He admitted to me that
Jim wasn't of the sort that can be got over by truckling, and accordingly he
took care to show himself as a man confronting without dismay ill-luck, censure,
and disaster. The smuggling of a few guns was no great crime, he pointed out. As
to coming to Patusan, who had the right to say he hadn't come to beg? The
infernal people here let loose at him from both banks without staying to ask
questions. He made the point brazenly, for, in truth, Dain Waris's energetic
action had prevented the greatest calamities; because Brown told me distinctly
that, perceiving the size of the place, he had resolved instantly in his mind
that as soon as he had gained a footing he would set fire right and left, and
begin by shooting down everything living in sight, in order to cow and terrify
the population. The disproportion of forces was so great that this was the only
way giving him the slightest chance of attaining his ends - he argued in a fit
of coughing. But he didn't tell Jim this. As to the hardships and starvation
they had gone through, these had been very real; it
