All day they flapped a tattoo with their wings and beat their sorrowful dead sounds into lovely Vera's ears. In the evening the Captain sent for the doctor.
All night long the uncontrollable feathery tribes encircled the town with their monotonous beating and swishing of wings.
The next day Vera grew worse, as Luba in the market place kept insisting that the Captain killed her Little Master of the Birds; until a committee of three working-men took it upon themselves to investigate. They started for the hill, but stopped off in order to induce the schoolmaster to join them.
The schoolmaster, however, did not allow himself to be disturbed. He was playing chess with a friend, and kept tapping the dull-sounding table with his fingers, and repeating in a monotone: "If he disturbs that pawn, he may lose his queen."
As the committee went on to the hill, they were overtaken by the doctor in his carriage. At last they arrived at the stone house and found the doctor walking briskly up and down the drawing room smoking a cigarette—he had not yet told the Captain.
Upstairs they could hear the Captain in Vera's darkened room, kneel down beside the bed.
"Do you know, my darling," he spoke. "I have never kept anything from you—but the other day when I told you about the beggar, I should have told you that he was—Are you listening, my dear? I should have told you that he was the same boy—the poor boy that lived with the pigeons.
"See; we have already been—are you listening, my dear? God has already punished us—now you can get better and we will go away from here. We will go to some quiet place.—Are you listening, my dear? We will go to some—do you hear me, Vera? My darling girl, don't sleep now. Tell me, what did the doctor say? Wake up Vera."—But the hand of death had already passed over Vera.
The Little Master of the Sky didn't need a grave and didn't want one. But they dug one for him just the same, at the end of the town. While his pigeons encircled the sky and swished the air, the villagers straightened his twisted, little body and slipped it into a narrow box, and lowered him down. The poor folk gave him a little grave, but he doesn't need it for he never uses it.