From: William Ansley <wansley@warwick.net>
Subject: Re: (whorl) Not-So Bad Horn
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 00:28:28 

At 5:32 PM -0400 4/16/01, Michael Straight wrote:
>On Sat, 19 Feb 2000, Allan Lloyd wrote:
>  > Horn is a careless and violent man, blaming others for his own mistakes.
>>  He loses all of the supplies that he was given for his mission, and then
>>  violently beats the man who was supposed to be looking after the boat,
>>  although he had no proof that he was involved in the theft.
>
>"Loses" them?  He asks the guy to watch his boat, and when he comes back
>his stuff is gone and the guy has no explanation for what happened to it. 
>I can see criticizing Horn for resolving the dispute with violence (though
>we don't know who threw the first punch) but I can't see faulting Horn for
>blaming the guy, and it's pretty harsh to call this careless.  Naive,
>maybe.

I have always been puzzled by this passage. If the guy Horn asked to 
watch his boat was involved with the robbery, then *Why* did he stick 
around? In fact, if he wasn't involved in the robbery but had just 
left the boat unguarded, why did he come back and why did he stick 
around when he saw that all the stuff had been stolen?

To me, it seems as if the boat-watcher is just guilty of gross 
stupidity or fecklessness. This may warrant a beating, but I don't 
think a good man, or even a man who had any control over his temper, 
would have given him one.

William Ansley

P.S. Horn does have one very important trait for a violent man to 
possess. He does seem pretty good at judging who he can beat up. <g>

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