om _he_ was the
only friend he had; and then said the same to me, warning me against Tom
and Iosefo, saying they were at the winder every night trying to break
in. And all this, maybe, on the very self-same day, the three of us
comparing notes and wondering where it was all going to end.

It ended sooner than any of us expected; for one morning, when Sarah
went to take him his coffee, his door was locked, and for all our
hammering we couldn't raise a sound. I broke it in at last, expecting
that he'd rise up and shoot me, and dodging when it went inward with a
crash. But there was nobody to shoot, the room being stark empty, and
the only thing of Old Dibs his clothes on a chair. We were at a loss
what to do, and waited for half an hour, thinking he might turn up.
Then, real uneasy in our minds, we went out to look for him. He wasn't
anywhere near the house or the beach, and as a last resort we went
across the island to the graveyard, thinking perhaps he had taken it
into his head to have a before-breakfast tootle on the flute. We found
him, sure enough, in the middle of the graveyard, but laying forward in
his old crimson dressing gown, dead.

Yes, sir, cold to the touch like it had been for hours, and holding a
blackened lantern in his poor old fist--dead as dead--face down in the
coral sand. We rolled him over to do what we could for him, but he had
passed to a place beyond help or hurt. I went back for Tom in a
protuberation, saying, "My God! Tom, what do you think's happened?--Old
Dibs's dead in the graveyard!" I guess the old man had never been so
close to Tom as he had been to me, boarding in my house and almost a
father to me and the wife, for Tom took it awful cool, and asked almost
the first thing about the money.

"You and me will divide on that," he says.

"Sure," I says, "but that can stand over till afterwards, Tom."

"Stand over, nothing!" he says, very sharp; and with that we both set
off running for my house.

It was a jumpy thing to enter that darkened room, with the feeling you
couldn't shake off that Old Dibs was peering in at us, and that every
minute we'd hear his footstep, everything laid out just as he had last
touched them, and almost warm, even to his slippers and his collar and
the old hat against the wall. But it made no more difference to Tom than
if it had been his own hat, and he tramped in like a policeman, saying,
"Where is it, Bill?"

"In one of them two camphor-wood chests," says