"D'ye think I'd be able to carry plunder around traveling as I was then?" he asked. "You see, I went down there for the Company I'm working for. I was looking out for rubber and hard woods. I'd worked from Buenaventura. From Buenaventura down to the Rio Caqueta and then followed that stream up to the water head, and then down the Codajaz. If you look at the map, you'll see it's no easy trip. No chance to pack much. All I wanted to carry was information. And there was only Somerfield along." "But Somerfield--he, as I take it, was the photographer, was he not? Did he not take care of the negatives? It would not have been much for him to take care of." "Well you see, he did take care of his negatives. But circumstances were different at the time. He had laid them away somewhere. After I killed him, I just brought away the camera and that was all." Positively, I gasped at the audacity of the man. He said the words "I killed him," so quietly, in so matter of fact a way, that for the moment I was breathless. Like most other men, I had never sat face to face with one who had taken the life of another. Even soldiers, though they, we suppose, kill men, do it in a machine-like way. The killing is impersonal. The soldier handles the machine and it is the machine that kills. The individual soldier does not know whether he kills or not. That is why we are able to make much of the soldier, perhaps, I have thought since, though it never appeared to me in that light before I met Rounds. Actually, we are repelled at the thought of a man who kills another deliberately. If it were not so, as Rounds pointed out, we would make a hero of the public executioner. He should be as heroic a figure as a general. But as I tell you, at the moment, when Rounds said, "when I killed him," I was shocked. I had never before realized how violence was a thing apart from my life. I had looked at the representation of murder on the stage. I had read novels with murder as the mainspring. I had seen shootings and stabbings in moving pictures. Yet, not until that moment had I any suspicion that violence was so rare a thing and that most of our lives are far, far removed from it. Actually, I have never struck a man, nor has any man ever lifted his hand against me in anger. It was, therefore, a startling thing to hear Rounds confess to having killed a fellow man. It was awesome. And yet, let me say, that at once I was possessed of a great desire to learn all about it, and down in my heart I feared that he would decide he had said something that he should not have said, and would either deny his statement or modify it in some way. I wanted to hear all the details. I was hugely interested. Was it morbidity? Then I came to myself after what was a shock, and awoke to the fact that he was talking in his quiet, even way. "But those Tlingas held the belief, and that was all there was to it," he was saying.