n Sin allee same
like Mista God. Wait. Wait. Wait. Laugh. Cly inside!"

Mate Snow was leaning forward on the bench in a queer, lazy attitude,
his face buried in his hands and his elbows propped on his knees. But no
one looked at him, for Minister Malden was speaking in the voice of one
risen from the dead, his eyes blinking at the Chinaman's lamp.

"Then you mean--you mean that he--isn't alive? After all? That he wasn't
alive--_then_? You mean it was all a--a kind of a--_joke_? I--I--Oh,
Mate! _Mate Snow!_"

It was queer to see him turning with his news to his traditional
protector. It had been too sudden; his brain had been so taken up with
the naked miracle that Gibbs was not alive that all the rest of it, the
drawn-out and devious revenge of the druggist, had somehow failed to get
into him as yet.

"Mate Snow!" he cried, running over to the sagging figure. "Did you
hear, Mate? Eh? It isn't true! It was all a--a joke, Mate!" He shook
Snow's shoulder with a pleading ecstasy. "It's been a mistake, Mate, and
I am--she is--little Hope is--"

He fell back a step, letting the man lop over suddenly on his doubled
knees, and stared blankly at a tiny drug-phial, uncorked and empty,
rolling away across the floor. He passed a slow hand across his eyes.
"Why--why--I--I'm afraid Mate is--isn't very--well."

Urkey had held its tongue too long. Now it was that the dam gave way and
the torrent came whirling down and a hundred voices were lifted. Crowds
and shadows distracted the light. One cried. "The man's dead, you fools;
can't you see?" A dozen took it up and it ran out and away along the
rumbling dock. "Doctor!" another bawled. "He's drank poison! Where's the
doctor at?" And that, too, went out, and a faint shout answered from
somewhere shoreward that the doctor was out at Si Pilot's place and Miah
White was after him, astraddle of the tar-wagon horse. Through it all I
can remember Aunt Nickerson's wail continuing, undaunted and
unquenchable, "God save our souls! God save our souls!"

And then, following the instinct of the frightened pack, they were all
gone of a sudden, carrying the dead man to meet the doctor. I would
have gone, too, and I had gotten as far as the door at their heels, when
I paused to look back at the Chinaman.

He lay so still over there on the couch--the thought came to me that he,
too, was dead. And of a sudden, leaning there on the door-frame, the
phantom years trooped back to me, and I saw the ma