ross himself
before the wayside crucifixes. All this gave rise to much gossip:

One night his companion was attacked by a fever and began to tremble like
a leaf in the wind. He went to the nearest town to get some medicine, and
then he shut himself up with her, and was not seen for six days.

The priest, having heard that the "Jewess" was about to die, came to
offer the consolation of his religion and administer the last sacrament.
Was she a Jewess? He did not know. But in any case, he wished to try to
save her soul.

Hardly had he knocked at the door when old Judas appeared on the
threshold, breathing hard, his eyes aflame, his long beard agitated, like
rippling water, and he hurled blasphemies in an unknown language,
extending his skinny arms in order to prevent the priest from entering.

The priest attempted to speak, offered his purse and his aid, but the old
man kept on abusing him, making gestures with his hands as if throwing;
stones at him.

Then the priest retired, followed by the curses of the beggar.

The companion of old Judas died the following day. He buried her himself,
in front of her door. They were people of so little account that no one
took any interest in them.

Then they saw the man take his pigs out again to the lake and up the
hillsides. And he also began begging again to get food. But the people
gave him hardly anything, as there was so much gossip about him. Every
one knew, moreover, how he had treated the priest.

Then he disappeared. That was during Holy Week, but no one paid any
attention to him.

But on Easter Sunday the boys and girls who had gone walking out to the
lake heard a great noise in the hut. The door was locked; but the boys
broke it in, and the two pigs ran out, jumping like gnats. No one ever
saw them again.

The whole crowd went in; they saw some old rags on the floor, the
beggar's hat, some bones, clots of dried blood and bits of flesh in the
hollows of the skull.

His pigs had devoured him.

"This happened on Good Friday, monsieur." Joseph concluded his story,
"three hours after noon."

"How do you know that?" I asked him.

"There is no doubt about that," he replied.

I did not attempt to make him understand that it could easily happen that
the famished animals had eaten their master, after he had died suddenly
in his hut.

As for the cross on the wall, it had appeared one morning, and no one
knew what hand traced it in that strange color.

Since then