258 Hunting the Grisly 



traveled, was a man who had a peculiarly 

 light-hearted way of looking at conventional 

 social obligations. Though in some ways a 

 true backwoods Donatello, he was a man of 

 much shrewdness and of great courage and 

 resolution. Moreover, he possessed what 

 only a few men do possess, the capacity to 

 tell the truth. He saw facts as they were, 

 and could tell them as they were, and he never 

 told an untruth unless for very weighty rea 

 sons. He was pre-eminently a philosopher, 

 of a happy, sceptical turn of mind. He had 

 no prejudices. He never looked down, as so 

 many hard characters do, upon a person pos 

 sessing a different code of ethics. His atti 

 tude was one of broad, genial tolerance. He 

 saw nothing out of the way in the fact that 

 he had himself been a road-agent, a profes 

 sional gambler, and a desperado at different 

 stages of his career. On the other hand, he 

 did not in the least hold it against any one 

 that he had always acted within the law. At 

 the time that I knew him he had become a 

 man of some substance, and naturally a stanch 

 upholder of the existing order of things. But 

 while he never boasted of his past deeds, he 

 never apologized for them, and evidently 

 would have been quite as incapable of under- 



