RED SLAYER AND THE TERROR 235 
this scene and sighed that they could not always 
live amid a country so peaceful and calm and 
lovely. A poet has written about it. More than 
one artist has painted it. Yet there is no use in 
blinking the fact that it had no effect whatever 
on Red Slayer. Perhaps there is less in the 
theory of environment than we suppose. Not all 
the warlike peoples have sprung from wild and 
rugged lands. Certainly, among weasels, the 
landscape hath no charms to soothe the savage 
breast. Red Slayer was a regular weasel, all 
weasel from the tip of his sharp, keen-scented 
nose to the tip of his furry tail (a distance of 
some sixteen inches), and he regarded the land- 
scape solely as a place in which to slay. He was 
a cruel beast, there can be no doubt about it, a 
cunning, alert, preternaturally active, sleek, 
pretty villain; and, as the saying goes, he got 
what was coming to him, which is not always the 
case with villains, except, of course, in the movies. 
But Red Slayer could never be put into a movie. 
The camera shutter is a quick thing, but not quick 
enough to capture Red Slayer! 
I said that Red Slayer lived in the half tumbled 
