The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1922-12-08

from something held in the crook of her arm But I didn't say"
 With that she had the burden uncovered and held forth in her EOutstretched hand.
 She held it out in the light where all of us could see-the thing Rolldown has discarded from his treasures, that had picked up and been robbed of in the kindly dark-the old brown casket-thing with the polished surfaces and the bits of intricate and ghasty caEy- ings that hand once let in the hgat of day and the sound of words the old, brown, sea-bitten, sand secured skull of Andrew Blake, with the two gold teeth in the up per jaw dulled by the furnishing tides that had brought it up slowly from it's bed in the bottom of the sea- And to think that I had car ried it, and felt of it, and not known what it was!
 It lay there supine in the nest of Mary's palm, paying us no heed whatever, Dus fixing its hollow re- gard on the shadows among the rafters. And Joshua, the brother made no sound.
 His face had gone a curious color, like the pallor of green things sprouting under stone. His knees caved little under his weig ght, and as we watched we saw his hands moving over his own breast, where the heart was, with a strengthless gesture, like caress. After what seemed a long while we heard his voice, a whisper of horrible fascination.
 
 Mary said nothing, nor did she move to do as he bade. Like some awful play of cat with a mouse she held quiet and watched him.
 "Mary-do as I say-and turn it over.''
 Her continued, unanswering silence seemed finally to arouse him. His voice turned shrilI Drawing on some last, hidden re- servoir of strength, he cried, Give it to me! It's mine!" and made an astonishing dart, both hands claWing for the relic. But my cousin Duncan was there to step in his way and send him carroming along the fringe of the crowd
 The queer fellow didn't stop or turn or try again; sending up all the while the most unearthIy | heard, he kept right on through the door and the packed vestry, cIawing his way to the open with that brief gift of vitality.
 It was so preposterous and so ghastIy to see him carrying on so, with his white linen and his fine black Wedding-clothes and the gray hair that would have covered selectman's head in another year 1t was all so absurdly horrible that we simply stood as we were in the church and wondered and looked at Mary Matheson and saw her face still rapt and quiet, and still set in that same bedeviIIed smile, as if she didn't know that round tears were running in streams down her cheeks
 Let him go," was all she said.
 They didn't let him go for too long time, for they had seen the stamp of death on the mans face. When they looked for him finally they found him lying in a dead huddle on the grass by Lem Whites gate. I shall never forget the look of him in the lantern light, nor the look of them that crowded around and stared down at him-Duncan, I remember, pug zled - Miah cursing God - and three dazed black men showing the whites of their eyes, strange ne groes being brought in from the wreck; for the ship was no India ship after all, but a coffee carrier from Brazil.
 But seeing Miah made me re- member that long-forgotten ques- ton that the lips of this dead man
 
 blind sky.
 ''Who is to pay the bill? Who is to pay the bill?"
 We'll. two of the three had helped to pay the bill now for a girls ight-hearted word But I think the other has paid the most, for she has had longer to meet the reckoning. She still lives there r alone in the house on the COW street. She is an old woman now, but there's not so much as a line on her face nor a thread of white in her hair. and that's bad. That's always bad. That's something like the thing that happened to the Wandering Jew. Yes, I'm quite sure Mary has paid.
 But I am near to forgetting the answer to it all. I hadn't so long | LO "dII dS uOSL IOlhS ndO-nO longer than an hour of that fate full night. For when I got home to our kitchen I found my cousin Duncan already there, with the lamp lit. I came in softly on ac- count of the lateness, and that's how I happened to surprise him and glimpse what he had before he could get it out of sight. I don't know yet how he came by it, but there on the kitchen table lay the skull of Andrew Blake. When I took it, against his protest, and turned it over, found what Joshua had meant-a hole as clean and round as a gimlet-bore in the bulge at the back of the head. And when, remembering the faint, chambered impact I had felt in shaking the unknown treasure on the beach, I peeped in through the l. round hole, I made out he shape of a-1eaden slug nestled loosely be- tween two points of bone behind the nose-a bullet, I should say, from an old, single-balI due1ing pistol-such a pistol as Joshua