falling was the loudest noise he had ever heard in his life. It
was a revelation. It seemed to recall him from far away, Actually the
thought, "Perhaps I may sleep to-night," passed through his mind. But he
did not believe it. He believed in nothing; and he remained sitting on
the thwart.

The dawn from behind the mountains put a gleam into his unwinking eyes.
After a clear daybreak the sun appeared splendidly above the peaks of
the range. The great gulf burst into a glitter all around the boat; and
in this glory of merciless solitude the silence appeared again before
him, stretched taut like a dark, thin string.

His eyes looked at it while, without haste, he shifted his seat from
the thwart to the gunwale. They looked at it fixedly, while his hand,
feeling about his waist, unbuttoned the flap of the leather case, drew
the revolver, cocked it, brought it forward pointing at his breast,
pulled the trigger, and, with convulsive force, sent the still-smoking
weapon hurtling through the air. His eyes looked at it while he fell
forward and hung with his breast on the gunwale and the fingers of his
right hand hooked under the thwart. They looked----

"It is done," he stammered out, in a sudden flow of blood. His last
thought was: "I wonder how that Capataz died." The stiffness of the
fingers relaxed, and the lover of Antonia Avellanos rolled overboard
without having heard the cord of silence snap in the solitude of the
Placid Gulf, whose glittering surface remained untroubled by the fall of
his body.

A victim of the disillusioned weariness which is the retribution meted
out to intellectual audacity, the brilliant Don Martin Decoud, weighted
by the bars of San Tome silver, disappeared without a trace, swallowed
up in the immense indifference of things. His sleepless, crouching
figure was gone from the side of the San Tome silver; and for a time the
spirits of good and evil that hover near every concealed treasure of
the earth might have thought that this one had been forgotten by all
mankind. Then, after a few days, another form appeared striding away
from the setting sun to sit motionless and awake in the narrow black
gully all through the night, in nearly the same pose, in the same place
in which had sat that other sleepless man who had gone away for ever so
quietly in a small boat, about the time of sunset. And the spirits of
good and evil that hover about a forbidden treasure understood well that
the silver of San To