Page:Harris Dickson--The black wolf's breed.djvu/273

Rh crossed the Bay, and climbed the slope of sand before the lonely house. It looked more deserted and desolate than I had ever seen it. The stillness of solitary death clung as a pall about the place. Pachaco, the Indian servant, sat beside the gate, as motionless as the post against which he leaned.

"How is the master, Pachaco?" I inquired, passing in.

"Him die yesterday," came the stolid reply.

"What? Dead! When?"

"The shadows were at the longest," he answered, indicating by a gesture the western horizon.

I hurried into the master's room. In the same position he had occupied, when, months ago, he had beckoned me to remain, he sat there, dead in his chair. His clothing hung about him in that sharply angular fashion in which garments cling to a corpse. Long, thin locks were matted above his brow, awesomely disarranged. But the pose of his head, drooped a little forward, suggested a melancholy reverie, nothing more.

The golden locket, which he had shown me that well-remembered night, rested within his shrunken palm. I noted that the side was open which revealed the blazing bar of red. As if absorbed in that same unpleasant thought, there sat the master, dead; dead, and I alone knew his story. How vividly the old man's sorrow came back; how it oppressed me.

I bent down in tender sympathy to look again upon his wasted features, and kneeling, gazed into his wide-