the historian to decide. Had he waited on the rising ground till the
proper hour he and his men would probably have been butchered; and in
judging him it is only fair to take this into account. What he should
perhaps have done was to acquaint his opponents that he proposed to
follow a new method. On the other hand, this, as destroying the element
of surprise, would have made his strategy of no avail, so that the
whole question is beset with difficulties. One cannot at least withhold
a reluctant admiration for the wit that had conceived so bold a scheme,
and the fell genius with which it was carried out.
What were his own feelings about himself at that triumphant moment?
Fain would his dogs have known, as breathing heavily and wiping their
cutlasses, they gathered at a discreet distance from his hook, and
squinted through their ferret eyes at this extraordinary man. Elation
must have been in his heart, but his face did not reflect it: ever a
dark and solitary enigma, he stood aloof from his followers in spirit
as in substance.
The night s work was not yet over, for it was not the redskins he had
come out to destroy; they were but the bees to be smoked, so that he
should get at the honey. It was Pan he wanted, Pan and Wendy and their
band, but chiefly Pan.
Peter was such a small boy that one tends to wonder at the man s hatred
of him. True he had flung Hook s arm to the crocodile, but even this
and the increased insecurity of life to which it led, owing to the
crocodile s pertinacity, hardly account for a vindictiveness so
relentless and malignant. The truth is that there was a something about
Peter which goaded the pirate captain to frenzy. It was not his
courage, it was not his engaging appearance, it was not . There is no
beating about the bush, for we know quite well what it was, and have
got to tell. It was Peter s cockiness.
This had got on Hook s nerves; it made his iron claw twitch, and at
night it disturbed him like an insect. While Peter lived, the tortured
man felt that he was a lion in a cage into which a sparrow had come.
The question now was how to get down the trees, or how to get his dogs
down? He ran his greedy eyes over them, searching for the thinnest
ones. They wriggled uncomfortably, for they knew he would not scruple
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