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. He straightened his shoulders till he looked
like a modern actor playing the hero in a romantic drama, and with quick
vain motions he stroked and twisted his brown moustache, and ran his
fingers through his curling hair.
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