The hermit Character Analysis

While riding out of Nacogdoches, the kid comes upon a hovel belonging to the hermit, a man both filthy and half mad. The hermit accommodates the kid and his mule, going so far as to provide the kid with shelter during a stormy night. The hermit was once a slaver in Mississippi who keeps as a memento of those days a dried and blackened human heart. He tells the kid that whiskey, women, money, and black people have the power to destroy the world, and prophecies that human beings will create an evil that can sustain itself for a thousand years.