My dear O'Hara:—
Not having heard from you this long time, I take my pen in hand to inform you that I am well and that despite your silly fears, no harm has come of building our house on the sightliest spot hereabouts. Martin Brown, the trader, from whom I bought the hinges and fittings will carry this letter to you and—
There it ended in a great blot. Whence had the spear come? Why had Martin Brown never called for the letter? Or had he called and gone away again?
What scenes that page of cheap, yellowed paper, from which the faded brown writing stared at us, had witnessed! It was indeed as if a dead man were speaking; and more than that, for the paper on which the man had been writing when he died had remained ever since under his very hands, undisturbed by all that had happened. How long must the man have been dead, I wondered. The stark white bones uncannily fascinated me. I saw that the feather had been stripped from the bare quill of the pen: could moths have done that? A knife could not have stripped it so cleanly.
Abe Guptil, who had been prowling about, now spoke, and we looked where he pointed and saw on the floor under a window the print of a single bare foot as clearly marked in mud as if it had been placed there yesterday.
"Hm! He saw that the job was done and went away again," said Gleazen, coolly.
I stared about the hut, from which apparently not a thing had been stolen, and thought that it was the more remarkable, because there were pans and knives in plain sight that would have been a fortune to an African black. The open ink-bottle, in which were a few brown crystals, the pen, which was cut from the quill of some African bird, and the faded letter, which was scarcely begun, told us that the spear, hurled through the open window, had pierced the man's body and snuffed out his life, without so much as a word of warning.
O'Hara unsteadily laid the letter down and stepped back. His face was still white. "It's words from the dead," he gasped.
"So it is," said Matterson, "but he's panned out a noble lot of stones."
As if Matterson's effeminate voice had again goaded him to fury, O'Hara burst out anew.