"Why take up your weapons?" he said, in a hoarse voice, as he struck the palm of his hand against his rifle barrel; "had I intended to kill you, you would have been dead long ago." The young man wheeled round his equipal, which brought him face to face with the stranger. The two men examined each other for a moment with the most minute attention. "Have you looked at me enough?" the stranger at length asked. "Yes," the Jaguar answered; "now tell me who you are, what brings you here, and how you reached me." "Those are a good many questions at once, still I will try to answer them. Who am I? No one knows, and there are moments when I am myself ignorant; I am an accursed, and a reprobate, prowling about the desert like a wild beast in search of prey; the Redskins, whose implacable enemy I am, and in whom I inspire a superstitious terror, call me the Klein Stoman; is this information sufficient for you?" "What?" the young man exclaimed utterly astounded, "The White Scalper!" "I am the man," the stranger quietly answered; "I am also known at times by the name of the Pitiless." All this had been said by the old man in that monotonous and hoarse voice peculiar to men who, deprived for a long time of the society of their fellow men, have been restricted to a forced silence, and hence speaking has become almost a labour to them. The Jaguar gave a start of repulsion at the sight of this sinister man, whose mournful reputation had reached him with all its horrors. His memory immediately recalled all the traits of ferocity and cruelty imputed to this man, and it was under the impression of this recollection that he said to him with an accent of disgust he did not wish to conceal-- "What is there in common between you and me?" The old man smiled sarcastically. "God," he answered, "connects all men to each other by invisible bonds which render them responsible one for the other; He willed it so, in His supreme omniscience, in order to render society possible." On hearing this wild, solitary man pronounce the name of Deity, and utter so strange an argument, the Jaguar felt his surprise redoubled. "I will not discuss the point with you," he said; "everyone in life follows the path destiny has traced for him, and it does not belong to me to judge you either favourably or unfavourably; still, I have the right of denying any connection with you, whatever may be your feelings toward me, or the motives that brought you hither; up to the present, we have been strangers to each other, and I desire to remain so for the future." "What do you know of it? What certainty have you that this is the first time we have been face to face? Man can no more answer for the past than for the future; both are in the hands of One more powerful than him, of Him who judges of actions immediately, and for whom there is only one weight and one measure."