mbs curled like a dead
spider, or else flung out at a stiff length of agony. And Capt. Noel
Jaynes lay dead with a better look on his gaunt old face in death
than in life. In truth Capt. Noel Jaynes might almost have been
taken for a good man as he lay there dead. And the outlaw who lived
next door to Margery Key was doubled up where he fell in a sulky
heap of death, and by his side wept his shrewish wife, shrilly
lamenting as if she were scolding rather than grieving, and I trow
in the midst of it all, the thought passed through my mind that it
was well for that man that he was past hearing, for it seemed as if
she took him to task for having died.

Of Dick Barry was no sign to be seen, but Nick lay not dead, but
dead drunk, and over him was crouched one of those black women with
a knife in her hand, and no one molested her, thinking him dead, but
dead he was not, only drunk, and she was wounded herself, with the
blood trickling from her head, unable to carry him from the field as
she had brought him.

They carried me past them, and the black woman's eyes rolled up at
us like a wild beast's in a jungle defending her mate, and I
remember thinking, though dimly, as a man will do when he has lost
much blood, that love was love, and perhaps showed forth the
brighter and whiter, the viler and blacker the heart which held it,
and then I knew no more for a space.

XIX

When I came to a consciousness of myself again, the first thing of
which I laid hold with my mind as a means whereby to pull my
recollections back to my former cognisance of matters was a broad
shaft of sunlight streaming in through the west window of the prison
in Jamestown. And all this sunbeam was horribly barred like the body
of a wasp by the iron grating of the window, and had a fierce sting
of heat in it, for it was warm though only May, and I was in a high
fever by reason of my wounds. And another thing which served to hale
me back to acquaintance with my fixed estate of life was a great
swarm of flies which had entered at that same window, and were
grievously tormenting me, and I was too weak to disperse them. All
my wounds were dressed and bandaged and I was laid comfortably
enough upon a pallet, but I was all alone except for the flies which
settled upon me blackly with such an insistence of buzzing that that
minor grievance seemed verily the greatest in the world, and for the
time all else was forgot.

For some little time I did not t