cate things and brought them up or sent
them, and, one day I shall never forget, when I had a blind headache and
had to lie down in the dark, she sat with Billy a long time, to keep him
from being lonesome, and afterward I found she had bandaged his legs.

"As time went on and he grew worse and worse, there was but one thing he
wanted. It was to be forgiven. I tried again to persuade him to tell
publicly the straight story of the killing and so die with a clean mind.
This he would not do. He had asked me to get him a headstone, with his
name on it all complete, and he was much set against being remembered as
a murderer. All his life he had lived outside the law, so to speak, and
he wanted to die respectable. I told him it might happen to him that,
after his death, somebody would be accused of the death of Cyrus Graves
and in that case I should break my promise to him and tell. To this he
consented, though unwillingly, and I am now telling, not only for the
sake of the boy, but for the sake of all to whom the boy may have to
pass on the strange things that came to Billy Jones. His sickness went
on in a very painful way, and when it got to be near the end he was
still more distressed in mind. He could not die, he said, unless he was
forgiven. And yet he had to die. For a while he seemed almost to hate me
because I could not show him the way.

"'If I was a Roman Catholic,' he said, 'and you was a priest, you could
forgive me yourself. You would forgive me, I'll warrant ye.'

"I did not deny it, though I felt very hopeless of anything I might do.
In those last days I could have denied him nothing. He seemed to me like
all the trouble in the world beating out there in the hut. God had made
him, and made him so that he did not rightly see good from evil, and he
had ruined his body, and now he was taking the consequences. And the
night before he died, he cried out a terrible voice:

"'You don't say a word about Jesus Christ.'

"I stood by his bed in anguish of mind perhaps as great as his. Yet not
as great, for he had no strength of body to bear the anguish with.

"'You never have said anything,' he went on.

"I felt as if he was accusing me of not giving him water when he was
fevered, or bread if he was hungry. Then he said he remembered something
he used to hear when he was little and he had hardly ever heard of it
since. But he had heard other things. And I guessed he was remembering
he had lived with the people who u