bear mute witness to a tragedy, but a tragedy
lacking outlines, vague, impersonal, without poignancy. To me,
they told with dreadful clearness the last sad chapter of the tale
of Peter, Peter who had made me so intimately his confidante, whose
love and hopes and solitary strivings I knew all about. Struck
down in the moment of his triumph by a great stupid lump of
soulless stone, by a blind, relentless mechanism which had been at
work from the beginning, timing that rock to fall--just then. Not
the moment before, not the moment after, out of an eternity of
moments, but at that one instant when Peter stooped for the last of
his brown bags--and then I rejected this, and knew that there was
nothing stupid or blind about it--and wondered whether it were
instead malicious, and whether all might have been well with Peter
if he had obeyed the voice that bade him leave the crucifix for
Bill--

Vaguely I heard around me a babble of exclamations and conjectures.
Murmurs of interest rose even from our captive band. Then came
Slinker's voice, loud with sudden fear:

"Say, you don't suppose the--the Bones would of got away with the
rest of the coin somehow, do you?" he demanded.

"Got away with it?" Tony contemptuously thrust aside the
possibility. "Got away with it how? He sure didn't leave the
island with it, did he? Would he of dug it up from one place jest
to bury it in another? Huh! Must of wanted to work if he did!
Now my notion is that this happened to one of the guys that was
burying the gold, and that the rest jest left him there for a sort
of scarecrow to keep other people out of the cave."

"But the gold?" protested Slinker. "They wouldn't leave that for a
scarecrow, would they?"

"Maybe not," admitted Tony, "but suppose that feller died awful
slow, and went on hollering and clutching at the bags? And they
couldn't of got that rock off'n him without a block and tackle, or
done much to make things easy for him if they had, him being jest a
smear, as you may say. Well, that cave wouldn't be a pleasant
place to stay in, would it? And no one would have the nerve to
snatch them bags away to bury 'em, 'cause a dying man, especially
when he dies hard, can have an awful grip. So what they done was
just to shovel the sand in on the gold they'd stowed away and light
out quick. And what we got to do to-morrow is to go there and dig
it up."

If the ingenuity of this reasoning was more remarkable than its
logi