utching her hand; and two dead pigs, huge and fat, which the woman had
been herding to safety.

And Jerry's nose told him of how the stream of the fugitives had split
and flooded past on each side and flowed together again beyond. Incidents
of the flight he did encounter: a part-chewed joint of sugar-cane some
child had dropped; a clay pipe, the stem short from successive breakages;
a single feather from some young man's hair, and a calabash, full of
cooked yams and sweet potatoes, deposited carefully beside the trail by
some Mary for whom its weight had proved too great.

The shell-fire ceased as Jerry trotted along; next he heard the rifle-
fire from the landing-party, as it shot down the domestic pigs on Somo's
streets. He did not hear, however, the chopping down of the coconut
trees, any more than did he ever return to behold what damage the axes
had wrought.

For right here occurred with Jerry a wonderful thing that thinkers of the
world have not explained. He manifested in his dog's brain the free
agency of life, by which all the generations of metaphysicians have
postulated God, and by which all the deterministic philosophers have been
led by the nose despite their clear denouncement of it as sheer illusion.
What Jerry did he did. He did not know how or why he did it any more
than does the philosopher know how or why he decides on mush and cream
for breakfast instead of two soft-boiled eggs.

What Jerry did was to yield in action to a brain impulse to do, not what
seemed the easier and more usual thing, but to do what seemed the harder
and more unusual thing. Since it is easier to endure the known than to
fly to the unknown; since both misery and fear love company; the apparent
easiest thing for Jerry to have done would have been to follow the tribe
of Somo into its fastnesses. Yet what Jerry did was to diverge from the
line of retreat and to start northward, across the bounds of Somo, and
continue northward into a strange land of the unknown.

Had Nalasu not been struck down by the ultimate nothingness, Jerry would
have remained. This is true, and this, perhaps, to the one who considers
his action, might have been the way he reasoned. But he did not reason
it, did not reason at all; he acted on impulse. He could count five
objects, and pronounce them by name and number, but he was incapable of
reasoning that he would remain in Somo if Nalasu lived, depart from Somo
if Nalasu died. He merely departe