t," he said, making way for Eliza, with a bow.

"No," came the child's voice, from half-way down the stairs; "I won't
come in! They say he walks, I've heard noises there at night."

A cold stuffy smell came out of the darkness of the unused room. Barton
struck a match, and, seeing a candle on the table, lit it The room had
been left as it was when last it was tenanted. On the table were an
empty bottle, two tumblers, and a little saucer stained with dry colors,
blue and red, part of Shields' stock-in-trade. There were, besides, some
very sharp needles of bone, of a savage make, which Barton recognized.
They were the instruments used for tattooing in the islands of the
Southern Seas.

Barton placed the lighted candle beside the saucer, and turned over the
needles. Presently his eyes brightened: he chose one out, and examined
it closely. It was astonishingly sharp, and was not of bone like the
others, but of wood.

Barton made an incision in the hard brittle wood with his knife, and
carefully felt the point, which was slightly crusted with a dry brown
substance.

"I thought so," he said aloud, as he placed the needle in a pocket
instrument-case: "the stem of the leaf of the coucourite palm!"

Then he went down-stairs with the candle.

"Did you see him?" asked Eliza, with wide-open eyes.

"Don't be childish, Eliza: there's no one to see. Why is the room left
all untidy?"

"Mother dare not go in!" whispered the child. Then she asked in a low
voice, "Did you never hear no more of that awful big Bird I saw the
night old Shields died in the snow?"

"The Bird was a dream, Eliza. I am surprised such a clever girl as you
should go on thinking about it," said Barton, rather sternly. "You were
tired and ill, and you fancied it."

"No, I wasn't," said the child, solemnly. "I never say no more about
it to mother, nor to nobody; but I did see it, ay, and heard it, too. I
remember it at night in my bed, and I am afraid. Oh, what's that?"

She turned with a scream, in answer to a scream on the other side of
the curtained door that separated the parlor from the bar of the _Hit or
Miss_.

Someone seemed to fall against the door, which at the same moment flew
open, as if the wind had burst it in. A girl, panting and holding her
hand to her breast, her face deadly white and so contorted by terror as
to be unrecognizable, flashed into the room. "Oh, come! oh, come!" she
cried. "She's killing her!" Then the girl vanished as hu