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The Panther 23 Kate, do you begin to see what these here things point to?"

"Tell me what you see," she said, "and then I'll tell you what I think of it all."

"All right, he said. "I see in Dan a man who's different from the common run of us. I read in a book once that in the ages when men lived like animals an had no weapons except sticks and stones, their muscles must have been two or three times as strong as they are now - more like the muscles of brutes. An their hearin' an'their sight an'their quickness an'their endurance was about three times more than that of ordinary men. Kate, I think that Dan is one of those men the book described! He knows animals because he has all the powers that they have. An' I know from the way his eyes go yellow that he has the fightin' instinct of the ancestors of man. So far I've kept him away from other men. Which I may say is the main reason I bought Dan Morgan's place so's to keep fightin' men away from our Whistlin' Dan. So I've been hidin' him from himself. You see, he's my boy if he belongs to anybody. Maybe when time goes on he'll get tame. But I reckon not. It's like takin' a panther cub - or a wolf pup - an' tryin' to raise it for a pet. Some day it gets the