He had that stiff way of his talk, like a man lecturing on a stool, but my mercy, he’d a tongue of silk that could twist a meal out of the pantry of Jews and strange hard people; fat landladies, the wives of the street, the widows in their villas, they would feed him until he groaned, loving him for his blitheness and his tales. He could not know the meaning of want though he had never a coin in the world. Yet he did not love towns; he would walk wide-eyed through them counting the seams in the pavements. He liked most to be staring at the gallant fishes in the streams, and gasping when he saw a great one.
I met him in the hills and we were gone together. And it was not a great while before he was doing and doing, for we came and saw a man committing a crime, a grave crime to be done in a bad world leave alone a good one like this, in a very lonely lovely place. So Monk rose up and slew him, and the woman ran blushing into the woods.
I looked at Mr. Monk, and the dead man on the road, and then at Mr. Monk again.
“Well,” I said, “we’d ... we’d better bury this feller.”
But Monk went and sat upon a bank and wiped his neck. The other lay upon his face as if he were sniffing at the road; I could see his ear was full of blood, it slipped over the lobe drip by drip as neat as a clock would tick.
And Monk, he said: “Look ye’re, my friend, there are dirtier things than dirt, and I would not like to mix this with the earth of our country.”
So we slung him into an old well with a stone upon his loins.
And a time after that we saw another man committing crime, a mean crime that you might do and welcome in America or some such region, but was not fitting to be done in our country.
So Monk rose up and slew him. Awful it was to see what Monk did to him. He was a great killer and fighter; Hector himself was but a bit of a page boy to Mr. Monk.
“Shall we give him an interment?” I asked him. He stood wiping his neck—he was always wiping his neck—and Monk he said: