"Then some men are brave at one time and cowardly at another," said the Colonel. "Men who will fight without shrinking, by day, are often completely demoralized by a night attack. With such men the trouble is, they cannot see to estimate their danger, and their imaginations multiply and magnify it a hundred fold. I know a man in this city who has been in a hundred fights, many of them most desperate encounters. He told me once that he believed it would frighten him to death to be awakened at night by a burglar in his room. "This is the fear, too, which paralyzes men in the presence of an earthquake. The sky may be clear and the air still, but the thought that in a moment chaos may come is too much for the ordinary nerves of mortals." "The bravest act I ever witnessed was on C street in this city," responded Strong. "It was a little Hebrew dunning a desperado for the balance due on a pair of pantaloons. The amount was six dollars and fifty cents. I would not have asked the fighter for the money for six times the sum, but the little chap not only asked for it, but when the fighter tried to evade him, he seized him by the arm with one hand and putting the forefinger of his other hand alongside his own nose, in the most insulting tone possible said: 'You does not get avay. Der man vot does not bay for his glose is, vots yer call him? one d----d loafer. I vants my monish.' "The fighter could no more escape from that eye than a chicken hawk can from the spell of the eye of the black snake, and so he settled. "That was the courage which it required the hardships and persecutions of one hundred generations of suffering men to acquire, and I tell you there was something thrilling in the way it was manifested." "So, too, men's ideas of honor are often warped strangely by education," Miller said. "Do you remember there was a Frenchman hanged in this city a few years ago? On the scaffold, with a grandiloquent air, just before the cap was drawn over his face, he said: 'Zey can hang me, but zey cannot hang Frawnce.' He had from childhood entertained the belief that there was but one entirely invincible nation on this earth, and that was France; and the thought that to the last France must be honored possessed him. "That man had murdered a poor woman of the town for her money." "I should say there were some queer ideas of honor in this country," chipped in the Colonel. "I believe the rule among some or all sporting men is, that it is entirely legitimate to practice any advantage on an opponent in a game, so long as the same idea controls the opponent. Still those men have most tenacious ideas of honor. Indeed they have a code of their own. If one borrows money of another he pays it if he has to rob someone to do it. If one stakes another--that is gives him money to play--and a winning is made, the profits are scrupulously divided. If one loses more at night than he has money to pay, he must have it early next morning or go into disgrace.