They classified him as a sleep-walker and took precautions accordingly--precautions that very often were futile.As his childhood advanced, he grew more cunning, so that the major portion of all his nights were spent in the open at realizing his other self.As a result, he slept in the forenoons.Morning studies and schools were impossible, and it was discovered that only in the afternoons, under private teachers, could he be taught anything.Thus was his modern self educated and developed.
But a problem, as a child, he ever remained.He was known as a little demon, of insensate cruelty and viciousness.The family medicos privately adjudged him a mental monstrosity and degenerate.Such few boy companions as he had, hailed him as a wonder, though they were all afraid of him.He could outclimb, outswim, outrun, outdevil any of them; while none dared fight with him.He was too terribly strong, madly furious.
When nine years of age he ran away to the hills, where he flourished, night-prowling, for seven weeks before he was discovered and brought home.The marvel was how he had managed to subsist and keep in condition during that time.They did not know, and he never told them, of the rabbits he had killed, of the quail, young and old, he had captured and devoured, of the farmers' chicken-roosts he had raided, nor of the cave-lair he had made and carpeted with dry leaves and grasses and in which he had slept in warmth and comfort through the forenoons of many days.
At college he was notorious for his sleepiness and stupidity during the morning lectures and for his brilliance in the afternoon.By collateral reading and by borrowing the notebook of his fellow students he managed to scrape through the detestable morning courses, while his afternoon courses were triumphs.In football he proved a giant and a terror, and, in almost every form of track athletics, save for strange Berserker rages that were sometimes displayed, he could be depended upon to win.But his fellows were afraid to box with him, and he signalized his last wrestling bout by sinking his teeth into the shoulder of his opponent.
After college, his father, in despair, sent him among the cow-punchers of a Wyoming ranch.Three months later the doughty cowmen confessed he was too much for them and telegraphed his father to come and take the wild man away.Also, when the father arrived to take him away, the cowmen allowed that they would vastly prefer chumming with howling cannibals, gibbering lunatics, cavorting gorillas, grizzly bears, and man-eating tigers than with this particular Young college product with hair parted in the middle.
There was one exception to the lack of memory of the life of his early self, and that was language.By some quirk of atavism, a certain portion of that early self's language had come down to him as a racial memory.In moments of happiness, exaltation, or battle, he was prone to burst out in wild barbaric songs or chants.It was by this means that he located in time and space that strayed half of him who should have been dead and dust for thousands of years.He sang, once, and deliberately, several of the ancient chants in the presence of Professor Wertz, who gave courses in old Saxon and who was a philogist of repute and passion.At the first one, the professor pricked up his ears and demanded to know what mongrel tongue or hog-German it was.When the second chant was rendered, the professor was highly excited.James Ward then concluded the performance by giving a song that always irresistibly rushed to his lips when he was engaged in fierce struggling or fighting.Then it was that Professor Wertz proclaimed it no hog-German, but early German, or early Teuton, of a date that must far precede anything that had ever been discovered and handed down by the scholars.So early was it that it was beyond him; yet it was filled with haunting reminiscences of word-forms he knew and which his trained intuition told him were true and real.He demanded the source of the songs, and asked to borrow the precious book that contained them.Also, he demanded to know why young Ward had always posed as being profoundly ignorant of the German language.And Ward could neither explain his ignorance nor lend the book.Whereupon, after pleadings and entreaties that extended through weeks, Professor Wert took a dislike to the young man, believed him a liar, and classified him as a man of monstrous selfishness for not giving him a glimpse of this wonderful screed that was older than the oldest any philologist had ever known or dreamed.
But little good did it do this much-mixed young man to know that half of him was late American and the other half early Teuton.Nevertheless, the late American in him was no weakling, and he (if he were a he and had a shred of existence outside of these two) compelled an adjustment or compromise between his one self that was a nightprowling savage that kept his other self sleepy of mornings, and that other self that was cultured and refined and that wanted to be normal and live and love and prosecute business like other people.The afternoons and early evenings he gave to the one, the nights to the other; the forenoons and parts of the nights were devoted to sleep for the twain.But in the mornings he slept in bed like a civilized man.In the night time he slept like a wild animal, as he had slept Dave Slotter stepped on him in the woods.
