in to-night,
I'm off to San Francisco."

"Why, Doc!" I cried out, utterly flabbergasted.

"Yes," he says, "and for all I care, the whole damned island may sink in
the sea, and stay there, with nothing but coconuts and my old accordion
to mark the place and maybe one of the wheels of that bloody handcart."

I was still knocked silly.

"But, Doc," I says, "you can't have enough to pay your passage."

Then he laughs.

"A hundred and seventy-five ain't much out of two thousand," he says.

"Two thousand?" I says, more mystified than ever.

"Yes," he answers, facing me square. "The two thousand that you owe me,
Mr. Ben."

I was just going to answer I didn't owe him nothing when the words
stopped midway on my tongue. I began to tremble instead--tremble till my
hands could hardly hold to my chair, till I couldn't keep my mouth from
dribbling.

"It's a debt of honor," he went on. "You can repudiate it if you want
to, and snap your fingers in my face, but I trusted you, I got you out
of your mess, and now I ask you for my money."

I couldn't answer anything, but looked at him speechless while he goes
to the door, peeks outside of it very careful lest any one might be
listening, and then comes tiptoeing back. It was so plain what he meant
to tell me that I managed to cry out, "No, no," and shook worse nor
ever.

"You're a straight man, Ben," he says. "What you owe, you pay. I
wouldn't have risked it if I had had any doubt about that."

I stumbled to the sideboard, poured myself out a big drink, never
minding what I spilled, and then went up to the attic where the bag of
money was still lying under the old mattress. I brought it down and give
it to him, only asking him not to count it as that was more than I could
bear.

He made a grab for it, never saying a word, and as he went out of the
doorway that was the last I ever saw of him.

Was I a fool to have paid him? Was it all a bluff, and just his hellish
ingeniousness for turning everything to account? Funk never questioned
she had died a natural death. Yet true or untrue, paying Doc that two
thousand dollars made me a murderer. In the bottom of my heart I believe
he did it, and there are nights when I wake up in a sweat of horror. But
wouldn't it have been a dirty act to bilk him of his money, all the more
as it would have been so easy? To this day I don't know whether I ought
to have paid or not, though if I hadn't it would have lightened my
conscience of a