Here were books,
not many, but well-bound and important-looking, covering fields in which
Jethro Fawe had never browsed, into which, indeed, he had never entered.
If he had opened them he would have seen a profusion of marginal notes in
pencil, and slips of paper stuck in the pages to mark important passages.
He turned from them to the welcome array of weapons on the walls-rifles,
shotguns, Indian bows, arrows and spears, daggers, and great
sheath-knives such as are used from the Yukon to Bolivia, and a sabre
with a faded ribbon of silk tied to the handle. This was all that Max
Ingolby had inherited from his father--that artillery sabre which he had
worn in the Crimea and in the Indian Mutiny. Jethro's eyes wandered
eagerly over the weapons, and, in imagination, he had each one in his
hand. From the pained, angry confusion he felt when he looked at the
books had emerged a feeling of fanaticism, of feud and war, in which his
spirit regained its own kind of self-respect. In looking at the weapons
he was as good a man as any Gorgio. Brains and books were one thing, but
the strong arm, the quick eye, and the deft lunge home with the sword or
dagger were better; they were of a man's own skill, not the acquired
skill of another's brains which books give.
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