"It took more than a few blows and I broke the poker, but finally I loosened the mortar and there under the two centre bricks was an iron box, about seven inches square, made like a little trunk. I fished it out and opened it—it opened from the side—and pulled out two thick handfuls of yellow letters, without envelopes. I opened the top one eagerly, but it had no date nor address. For signature there was only the name 'Olive.'"
He stopped abruptly and stared at the thick-bellied decanter before him. His voice sank lower.
"I have never heard or read that name since," he said slowly, "without a thrill at my nerves like a picked violin string. They were the wickedest letters ever written, I think. Even for a woman, they were incredible."
The men stared at him, mystified, confused, eager.
"One, the third, I think, said something like this: 'They may bury me, now that you want me no longer. They shall never bury these letters—I swear it. Here in the room where I wrote them, they shall live after I am gone.'
"And they lived—God, they lived! As I pored over them, cross-legged by that little hearth, I believe that I was as lost to the world about me as Father Kelly had been a few moments before. They were not written for me, they offered me nothing, the writer was beyond doubt dead and gone; but for the moment those yellow papers held me, soul and body, in such a grip as I have never known before or since. I can't tell you ... I didn't know such things could be written...." He shook his head slowly.
"I'd always been fairly decent, you see—there were circumstances ... I couldn't take advantage...
"Did you ever turn over a good old sunny rock, flat, a little mossy, but clean and wholesome? And underneath it crawls—it crawls! Black, slimy slug things ... muck of the Pit!
"That was me. And every time my eyes fell on one of those amazing phrases on that yellow page, I had to hold the rock down!
"Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. I jumped like a woman. Father Kelly stood over me, and he looked, from where I sat below him, unhumanly tall. He held out his hand.