Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/75



people and things and felt certain Don Ricardo would be better by morning.

Perhaps he was.

There came a knock at the door, and one entered whose face was a face of sorrow and mourning.

Don Ricardo was dead.

Burials are such sad _ necessities! Why isn't the old classical incremation better? A retort to hold the body; a furnace to reduce it to ashes; an urn to hold the dust. I doubt if the daily, sickening thought that the hands which were ever devotedly ours for every need and tender care, the eyes that read love in return in our own, the lips that kissed us into life and light, are going back to their dust in slow and loathsome and crawling decay and corruption, is as pleasant as it might be. Still, tastes differ. Burials may be more christianlike. It doesn't seem so to me—that's all.

Sincere mourners carried Don Ricardo's body to its grave.

And when we came back to Caldwell's and sat there at the open windows in his little parlor, and talked about the dead man, wondering what friends or relatives he had in his old home somewhere up near Santiago, wondering what they would say when they heard of his death, we grew very melancholy. We were all away from home, too. Very far away. All with stout hearts. All with good courage. But what befell Don Ricardo might come to us, would in all certainty reach us somewhere. Perhaps while we were still strangers in a strange land.

Page and I said "Good-night" to Mrs. Caldwell, and started to go down town.

"T'll go with you," said Henry. "I can't sleep just yet. And Lizzie, why don't you go to bed, child? You're tired out, youknow. Ill be back soon."

The night was perfect. Stilland cool. The moon was nearly full.

At our feet, so far below us that the

houses and ships were tuys in size, lay the crescent of the lower town traced in triple lines of gas-light from the three business streets: lay the bay of silver undulating in slow magnificence as the ground-swell came in with the first of the flood.

At our left was the hill of the "MainTop," looking by day like a gigantic leprous abscess ready for the knife; reeking both by night and day in its dens of misery and disease with more than the leper's foulness; a thing of beauty in the moonlight now.

Behind us, peak above peak, rising in snowy splendor till their king, Aconcagua, 23,000 feet above the sea, carried earth in unearthly grandeur to heaven, reigned the Andes of Chile.

And the Southern Cross shone out. Dimmed in glory by the moon, yet still radiant with the everlasting light that its stars gave forth ages before the world was, it hung in the midnight sky just over the churchyard where Don Ricardo slept, and pointed upward to God.

"Let's go round to his quarters a moment," said Henry. "The outer door was left unlocked this afternoon, and somebody may take a notion to steal something. You'll have plenty of time to reach the Mole."

Our boat had orders that night to wait till we came, and as the house where the Don had lived wasn't much out of our way, we went.

There's a sort of irregular, threecornered plaza in the lower town. I don't remember its name. Perhaps it has none. Four or five streets make it in uniting and crossing each other. It's the only open space in the city of that especial shape, however, and is near Cochrane street. There is a long twostory building on one side of it, that has a balcony or open veranda running the entire length of its front, on a level with the floor of the second story. Its projecting width is some seven feet, about that of the sidewalk belowit. At