kind of fury, "what does all
that snuff mean?"

"My friend," replied Brown, with equal seriousness, "there is one mark
of all genuine religions: materialism. Now, devil-worship is a perfectly
genuine religion."

They had come up on the grassy scalp of the hill, one of the few bald
spots that stood clear of the crashing and roaring pine forest. A mean
enclosure, partly timber and partly wire, rattled in the tempest to tell
them the border of the graveyard. But by the time Inspector Craven had
come to the corner of the grave, and Flambeau had planted his spade
point downwards and leaned on it, they were both almost as shaken as the
shaky wood and wire. At the foot of the grave grew great tall
thistles, grey and silver in their decay. Once or twice, when a ball
of thistledown broke under the breeze and flew past him, Craven jumped
slightly as if it had been an arrow.

Flambeau drove the blade of his spade through the whistling grass into
the wet clay below. Then he seemed to stop and lean on it as on a staff.

"Go on," said the priest very gently. "We are only trying to find the
truth. What are you afraid of?"

"I am afraid of finding it," said Flambeau.

The London detective spoke suddenly in a high crowing voice that was
meant to be conversational and cheery. "I wonder why he really did hide
himself like that. Something nasty, I suppose; was he a leper?"

"Something worse than that," said Flambeau.

"And what do you imagine," asked the other, "would be worse than a
leper?"

"I don't imagine it," said Flambeau.

He dug for some dreadful minutes in silence, and then said in a choked
voice, "I'm afraid of his not being the right shape."

"Nor was that piece of paper, you know," said Father Brown quietly, "and
we survived even that piece of paper."

Flambeau dug on with a blind energy. But the tempest had shouldered away
the choking grey clouds that clung to the hills like smoke and revealed
grey fields of faint starlight before he cleared the shape of a rude
timber coffin, and somehow tipped it up upon the turf. Craven stepped
forward with his axe; a thistle-top touched him, and he flinched. Then
he took a firmer stride, and hacked and wrenched with an energy like
Flambeau's till the lid was torn off, and all that was there lay
glimmering in the grey starlight.

"Bones," said Craven; and then he added, "but it is a man," as if that
were something unexpected.

"Is he," asked Flambeau in a voice that went o