He
saw that the skin was beautiful, which appealed to his barbaric
sense of ornamentation, and when it stiffened and later commenced
to decompose because of his having no knowledge of how to cure or
tan it was with sorrow and regret that he discarded it. Later,
when he chanced upon a lone, black warrior wearing the counterpart
of it, soft and clinging and beautiful from proper curing, it
required but an instant to leap from above upon the shoulders of
the unsuspecting black, sink a keen blade into his heart and possess
the rightly preserved hide.
There were no after-qualms of conscience. In the jungle might is
right, nor does it take long to inculcate this axiom in the mind
of a jungle dweller, regardless of what his past training may have
been. That the black would have killed him had he had the chance
the boy knew full well. Neither he nor the black were any more
sacred than the lion, or the buffalo, the zebra or the deer, or any
other of the countless creatures who roamed, or slunk, or flew,
or wriggled through the dark mazes of the forest. Each had but
a single life, which was sought by many.
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