“That 150-grain soft-nose bullet is some executioner,” he declared, forcefully.  “Your bullet mushroomed just after it went into his breast.  It tore his lung to pieces, cut open his heart, made a mess of kidneys an’ paunch, an’ broke his spine....  An’ look at this hole where it came out!”

I helped Copple heave the load on his saddle and tie it securely, and I got my hands red at the job, but I did not really look at the buck again.  And upon our way back to camp I rode in the lead all the way.  We reached camp before sunset, where I had to endure the felicitations of R.C. and my comrades, all of whom were delighted that at last I had gotten a buck.  Takahashi smiled all over his broad brown face.  “My goodnish!  I awful glad!  Nice fat deer!”

That night I lay awake a long time, and though aware of the moan of the wind in the pines and the tinkle of the brook, and the melancholy hoot of an owl, and later the still, sad, black silence of the midnight hours, I really had no pleasure in them.  My mind was active.

Boys are inherently cruel.  The games they play, at least those they invent, instinctively partake of some element of brute nature.  They chase, they capture, they imprison, they torture, and they kill.  No secret rendezvous of a boy’s pirate gang ever failed to be soaked with imaginary blood!  And what group of boys have not played at being pirates?  The Indian games are worse—­scalping, with red-hot cinders thrown upon the bleeding head, and the terrible running of the gauntlet, and burning at the stake.

What youngster has not made wooden knives to spill the blood of his pretended enemies?  Little girls play with dolls, and with toy houses, and all the implements of making a home; but sweet and dear as the little angels are they love a boy’s game, and if they can through some lucky accident participate in one it is to scream and shudder and fight, indeed like the females of the species.  No break here between these little mothers of doll-babies and the bloody mothers of the French Revolution, or of dusky, naked, barbarian children of a primitive day!

Boys love the chase.  And that chase depends upon environment.  For want of wild game they will harry a poor miserable tom-cat with sticks and stones.  I belonged once to a gang of young ruffians who chased the neighbor’s chickens, killed them with clubs, and cooked them in tin cans, over a hidden fire.  Boys love nothing so much as to chase a squirrel or a frightened little chipmunk back and forth along a rail fence.  They brandish their sticks, run and yell, dart to and fro, like young Indians.  They rob bird’s nests, steal the eggs, pierce them and blow them.  They capture the young birds, and are not above killing the parents that fly frantically to the rescue.  I knew of boys who ground captured birds to death on a grindstone.  Who has not seen a boy fling stones at a helpless hop-toad?