Page:Weird Tales volume 31 number 03.djvu/89

 When he opened the door, there was no woman there, and no milk-can. He strolled down the walk toward the fountain at which the milk-woman often stopped to water her donkey. As he came near the fountain he heard voices. When he passed the clump of bushes that had hidden the place from his sight, he discovered an excited group arguing and gesticulating about some object which lay on the ground. There were two policemen in the group.

"Has something happened?" he inquired as he joined the circle.

"They killed a man last night," said one of the bystanders. One of the policemen asked the painter if he had seen or heard anything that might throw any light on the mystery. He was about to tell his ghost-story, when it occurred to him how improbable it was, and he contented himself with replying that as he had walked home late at night a man in front of him had turned into the little side path, and that before he had left the street-car, a man had asked the way to the Valle San Giorgio.

"Would you know the man in front of you if you saw him again?"

The painter was not sure. But he thought he remembered certain things about him. For example, he remembered very distinctly that the man had a beard.

The policeman looked up quickly. "Is this the man?" he asked, and drew off the sack which had covered the head of the prostrate form.

The painter started back in terror, and for a moment his voice failed him completely. There was the head he had seen in the window, the eyes still staring wide, the matted hair clinging about the wound over the left temple, the wild, scraggly beard. The look of anguish and appeal was still in the eyes that gazed up into the eyes of the painter, as if the deed were not yet committed and the man were begging him to come to his aid. And as the living man gazed with fascinated horror into the eyes of the dead man, the expression of the eyes seemed to change to one of reproach. The little dog had been ready and anxious to dash out and help defend the victim of a band of assassins, but his master had been too stupid, too selfish, too cowardly to come to the succor of a fellow-being in distress.

The painter recovered his self-control and said dully to the policeman:

"Yes, I think that was the man."

"Did you know him?" asked one of the neighbors with whom the German painter had a bowing acquaintance. And when the painter shook his head, the voluble Italian prattled on:

"It is much better that the bandits made away with this man than if they had killed a gentleman like you. He was"

And he touched his finger compassionately to his forehead.

From the general discussion that followed, the artist learned that the dead man, who for a good part of his life had been a shepherd in the Alban Hills, was a strange dreamer of a fellow who claimed to have the gift of second sight, to be able to foretell the future, and to have the power to cure disease by prayer. Members of the group told various stories of strange proofs of his psychic powers, notably of one instance in which he had described in great detail a fire which was raging at that same moment in a town a hundred miles away, and of which he had no possible means of knowledge.

"It is strange," said one of the neighbors thoughtfully, "that he didn't foresee what would happen to him when he came out here last night!"

"Perhaps he did foresee it," said one