But seeing Miah made me remember that long-forgotten question that the lips of this dead man had put to the deaf sea and the blind sky.
"Who is to pay the bill? Who is to pay the bill?"
Well, two of the three had helped to pay the bill now for a girl's light-hearted word. But I think the other has paid the most, for she has had longer to meet the reckoning. She still lives there alone in the house on the cow street. She is an old woman now, but there's not so much as a line on her face nor a thread of white in her hair, and that's bad. That's always bad. That's something like the thing that happened to the Wandering Jew. Yes, I'm quite sure Mary has paid.
But I am near to forgetting the answer to it all. I hadn't so long to wait as most folks had—no longer than an hour of that fateful night. For when I got home to our kitchen I found my cousin Duncan already there, with the lamp lit. I came in softly on account of the lateness, and that's how I happened to surprise him and glimpse what he had before he could get it out of sight.
I don't know yet how he came by it, but there on the kitchen table lay the skull of Andrew Blake. When I took it, against his protest, and turned it over, I found what Joshua had meant—a hole as clean and round as a gimlet-bore in the bulge at the back of the head. And when, remembering the faint, chambered impact I had felt in shaking the unknown treasure on the beach, I peeped in through the round hole, I made out the shape of a leaden slug nested loosely between two points of bone behind the nose—a bullet, I should say, from an old, single-ball dueling pistol—such a pistol as Joshua Blake had played with in the shadow of apple-trees on that distant afternoon, and carried in his pocket, no doubt, to the warm-lit gaiety of Alma Beedie's birthday party....
FOOTNOTES:
[16] Copyright, 1919, by The Pictorial Review Company.
Copyright, 1921, by Wilbur Daniel Steele.