The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: about that, I would have borrowed another musket for him.
I left the city pretty early the next morning, and if this
grizzled man had not happened to encounter my name in the papers
the other day in St. Louis, and felt moved to seek me out,
I should have carried to my grave a heart-torturing uncertainty
as to whether he ever got out of the riots all right or not.
I ought to have inquired, thirty years ago; I know that.
And I would have inquired, if I had had the muskets; but, in the
circumstances, he seemed better fixed to conduct the investigations
than I was.
One Monday, near the time of our visit to St. Louis,
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