on the roof ceased with
miraculous suddenness, leaving the outside world empty of sound save
for the DRIP, DRIP, DRIP of eaves. Nobody ventured to fill in the
pause that followed the stranger's last words, so in a moment he
continued his narrative.

We had every sort of people with us off and on, and, as I was lookout
at a popular game, I saw them all. One evening I was on my way home
about two o'clock of a moonlit night, when on the edge of the shadow I
stumbled over a body lying part across the footway. At the same
instant I heard the rip of steel through cloth and felt a sharp stab in
my left leg. For a minute I thought some drunk had used his knife on
me, and I mighty near derringered him as he lay. But somehow I didn't,
and looking closer, I saw the man was unconscious. Then I scouted to
see what had cut me, and found that the fellow had lost a hand. In
place of it he wore a sharp steel hook. This I had tangled up with and
gotten well pricked.

I dragged him out into the light. He was a slim-built young fellow,
with straight black hair, long and lank and oily, a lean face, and big
hooked nose. He had on only a thin shirt, a pair of rough wool pants,
and the rawhide home-made zapatos the Mexicans wore then instead of
boots. Across his forehead ran a long gash, cutting his left eyebrow
square in two.

There was no doubt of his being alive, for he was breathing hard, like
a man does when he gets hit over the head. It didn't sound good. When
a man breathes that way he's mostly all gone.

Well, it was really none of my business, as you might say. Men got
batted over the head often enough in those days. But for some reason I
picked him up and carried him to my 'dobe shack, and laid him out, and
washed his cut with sour wine. That brought him to. Sour wine is fine
to put a wound in shape to heal, but it's no soothing syrup. He sat up
as though he'd been touched with a hot poker, stared around wild-eyed,
and cut loose with that song you were singing. Only it wasn't that
verse. It was another one further along, that went like this:

Their coffin was their ship, and their grave it was the sea,
Blow high, blow low, what care we;
And the quarter that we gave them was to sink them in the sea,
Down on the coast of the High Barbaree.

It fair made my hair rise to hear him, with the big, still, solemn
desert outside, and the quiet moonlight, and the shadows, and him
sitting up straight and