Royal he was, by nature, by training, by deed. He carried himself with consciousness of royalty. He looked royal--as a magnificent stallion may look royal, as a lion on a painted tawny desert may look royal. He was as splendid a brute--an adumbration of the splendid human conquerors and rulers, higher on the ladder of evolution, who have appeared in other times and places. His pose of body, of chest, of shoulders, of head, was royal. Royal was the heavy-lidded, lazy, insolent way he looked out of his eyes.
Royal in courage was he, this moment on the Arangi, despite the fact that he knew he walked on dynamite. As he had long since bitterly learned, any white man was as much dynamite as was the mysterious death-dealing missile he sometimes employed. When a stripling, he had made one of the
