“And by all that’s holy!” he cried, “it’s got her name on it! Look!”
I took it from him. The dagger was of antique pattern, its steel rusted and corroded but still resilient enough to make it a dangerous weapon, and on the hilt, still legible, roughly inlaid in silver like the amateur work of a sailorman, was the name—Lucia!
“I guess she murdered him with that!” said the old man, grimly, glancing from the stiletto to the skeleton grinning up at us from the hole where it had so long lain undisturbed. He turned toward where his daughter sat in the shade of the trees. “Here, Pauline!” he called to her. “Come and see—your friend the pirate and the knife that killed him!”
The girl jumped up and ran across to us, all excitement.
“How wonderful!” she said. “It’s like a dream come true!”
At the time, excited as we all were, I did not notice the strangeness of that spontaneous phrase. She stood upon the edge of the excavation and took the stiletto with eager curiosity from her father. She held it in both hands, breast-high, the point toward her, to read the name upon the hilt.
“Lucia!” she cried, with a strange look toward us, as though dimly and uncertainly recalling some terrible experience. “Lucia!” She repeated the name with a peculiar, slow intonation—an intonation of puzzled half-remembrance.
We stared at her, fascinated. Was our fantastic theory true?
Her gaze lost us, fixed itself into vacancy. Her features changed. An expression of vague fear—the fear of the hypnotic shrinking at some invisible danger—came into them. She opened her mouth as though to speak.
She uttered only an inarticulate cry—a cry of fright as the loose stones of the excavation slipped from under her. She fell headlong into the hole, where she lay oddly—ominously—still. I jumped down after her, lifted her up. The rusty old stiletto, caught under her in her fall, had driven straight into her heart—broken off at the hilt!