a long time since he had been
a child. That accounted for everything. Barring his marriage, none of his
crimes had been committed in cold blood; but he had gone into _that_ with
his eyes open, knowing himself to be incapable of the feeling women call
love. (Of course, there was always the other thing.) But that love of his
wife's was something divine--a thing to believe in, not to see. Men were
not made to mate with divinities. He ought to have fallen down and
worshiped the little thing, not married her. But was it his fault!

That particular crime would never have been committed if he had been left
to himself. It was not the will of God; it was that will of the old man
Tyson. The whole thing was a cursed handicap from beginning to end. He
was strong; but the world and life and destiny were a bit stronger--it
was three to one, and two out of the three were women--see? It's always
two to one on them. You can't hit out straight from the shoulder when
you fight with women, Stanny. If you can keep 'em going, it's about all.
He had nothing to say against Destiny, mind. Destiny fights fair enough
(for a woman), and she had fought fair with him. She had picked him up
out of the dirt when the scrimmage was hottest, and pitched him into the
desert to die. It was better to die out here in the desert cleanly, than
to die in the gutter at home. If only he could die fighting!

Now, whatever may be said of this remarkable document, at any rate it
bore on the face of it a passionate veracity. But it gave the lie to
every word of his letter to his wife. Tyson had dashed it off in hot
haste, risen to his work, and then he must have sat down again to
write that letter. Taken singly, the three documents were misleading;
taken altogether, they formed a masterpiece of autobiography. The
self-revelation was lucid and complete; it gave you Tyson the man of no
class, Tyson the bundle of paradoxes, British and Bohemian, cosmopolitan
and barbarian; the brute with the immortal human soul struggling
perpetually to be.

He put the diary into his dispatch-box. It was found there afterwards,
and published with a few other letters. Everybody knows that simple
straightforward record; it shows Tyson at his bravest and his best. If he
had tried to separate the little gold of his life from the dross of it he
could not have succeeded better. He looked over the postscript hurriedly.
When he came to the words, "Knowing myself to be incapable of the feeling