larly unconscious of the object of his fear. He
saw the moonlight gilding the coffin, but no longer the coffin that it
gilded. Raising his eyes and turning his head, he noted, curiously and
with surprise, the black branches of the dead tree, and tried to
estimate the length of the weather-worn rope that dangled from its
ghostly hand. The monotonous barking of distant coyotes affected him as
something he had heard years ago in a dream. An owl flapped awkwardly
above him on noiseless wings, and he tried to forecast the direction of
its flight when it should encounter the cliff that reared its
illuminated front a mile away. His hearing took account of a gopher's
stealthy tread in the shadow of the cactus. He was intensely observant;
his senses were all alert; but he saw not the coffin. As one can gaze at
the sun until it looks black and then vanishes, so his mind, having
exhausted its capacities of dread, was no longer conscious of the
separate existence of anything dreadful. The Assassin was cloaking the
sword.

It was during this lull in the battle that he became sensible of a
faint, sickening odor. At first he thought it was that of a
rattle-snake, and involuntarily tried to look about his feet. They were
nearly invisible in the gloom of the grave. A hoarse, gurgling sound,
like the death-rattle in a human throat, seemed to come out of the sky,
and a moment later a great, black, angular shadow, like the same sound
made visible, dropped curving from the topmost branch of the spectral
tree, fluttered for an instant before his face and sailed fiercely away
into the mist along the creek.

It was the raven. The incident recalled him to a sense of the situation,
and again his eyes sought the upright coffin, now illuminated by the
moon for half its length. He saw the gleam of the metallic plate and
tried without moving to decipher the inscription. Then he fell to
speculating upon what was behind it. His creative imagination presented
him a vivid picture. The planks no longer seemed an obstacle to his
vision and he saw the livid corpse of the dead woman, standing in
grave-clothes, and staring vacantly at him, with lidless, shrunken eyes.
The lower jaw was fallen, the upper lip drawn away from the uncovered
teeth. He could make out a mottled pattern on the hollow cheeks--the
maculations of decay. By some mysterious process his mind reverted for
the first time that day to the photograph of Mary Matthews. He
contrasted its blond