'I don't dlink he could do more than perhaps look upon that straight path. He seemed to have been puzzled by what he saw, for he interrupted himself in his narrative¹ 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 sneering². To me the conversation of these two across the creek³ appears now as the deadliest kind of duel⁴ 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 utterly⁵ 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 renounced⁶ 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, censure⁷, and disaster. The smuggling⁸ of a few guns was no great crime, he pointed⁹ 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

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