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He too glanced at those rude vast suggestions of entrenchment about
them, looking not so much at them as through them and over the hills to
the innumerable multitudes beyond. Something of the same sort came into
all their minds--a vision of little people coming out to war, in a
flood, the little people, inexhaustible, incessant, malignant....
"
They are little," said the youngest brother; "but they have numbers
beyond counting, like the sands of the sea."
"They have arms--they have weapons even, that our brothers in Sunderland
have made."
"Besides, Brothers, except for vermin, except for little accidents with
evil things, what have we seen of killing?"
"I know," said the eldest brother. "For all that--we are what we are.
When the day of trouble comes we must do the thing we have to do."
He closed his knife with a snap--the blade was the length of a man--and
used his new pine staff to help himself rise. He stood up and turned
towards the squat grey immensity of the house. The crimson of the
sunset caught him as he rose, caught the mail and clasps about his neck
and the woven metal of his arms, and to the eyes of his brother it
seemed as though he was suddenly suffused with blood ...
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