“And now you’re out for blood?” he burst out presently.
I knocked out my pipe.
“Some years ago,” I said. “I was in Macedonia. Up in the mountains, I remember, there was an old churchyard, quite full of graves.” I looked about me. “The place was not unlike this. . . . And every grave had been opened—to release the spirits of the dead. It was a local superstition. Now, what do you think lived and grew fat. . . . in that churchyard?”
There was a long silence.
At length I leaned forward.
“Snakes, Perowne, snakes. Snakes that traded on devotion . . . turned piteous piety to their own ends . . . used women’s love for their husbands to fill their bellies . . . battened upon the dead . . . And you ask if I’m out for blood. What do you think?”
“Think?” said he. “Why, I think you’re very confident.”
“I confess it,” said I. “I’m a poacher to-day. But you should watch your preserves.”
He stared at the edge of the road and into the depths beyond. Then he tilted his chin and scanned the grandeur of Navarre—all mountains and sudden valleys and again mountains like footstools to mountains greater than they, so that the world seemed nothing but a black sea of breakers foam-crested, petrified.
“You’re sore, of course,” he mused. “It’s a way relicts have. . . . But why have you left it so long?”