ey killed 'm. I never seen 'm do it. They just
told me about it."

"And the hill?" the missionary asked, pointing to the central part of the
print, for which the photograph seemed to have been taken. "Can you tell
us the name of the hill?"

I shook my head.

"Never had no name. They killed folks there. I've seem 'm more 'n
once."

"This time he agrees with the majority of the authorities," announced the
missionary with huge satisfaction. "The hill is Golgotha, the Place of
Skulls, or, as you please, so named because it resembles a skull. Notice
the resemblance. That is where they crucified--" He broke off and
turned to me. "Whom did they crucify there, young scholar? Tell us what
else you see."

Oh, I saw--my father reported that my eyes were bulging; but I shook my
head stubbornly and said:

"I ain't a-goin' to tell you because you're laughin' at me. I seen lots
an' lots of men killed there. They nailed 'em up, an' it took a long
time. I seen--but I ain't a-goin' to tell. I don't tell lies. You ask
dad an' ma if I tell lies. He'd whale the stuffin' out of me if I did.
Ask 'm."

And thereat not another word could the missionary get from me, even
though he baited me with more photographs that sent my head whirling with
a rush of memory-pictures and that urged and tickled my tongue with
spates of speech which I sullenly resisted and overcame.

"He will certainly make a good Bible scholar," the missionary told father
and mother after I had kissed them good-night and departed for bed. "Or
else, with that imagination, he'll become a successful fiction-writer."

Which shows how prophecy can go agley. I sit here in Murderers' Row,
writing these lines in my last days, or, rather, in Darrell Standing's
last days ere they take him out and try to thrust him into the dark at
the end of a rope, and I smile to myself. I became neither Bible scholar
nor novelist. On the contrary, until they buried me in the cells of
silence for half a decade, I was everything that the missionary
forecasted not--an agricultural expert, a professor of agronomy, a
specialist in the science of the elimination of waste motion, a master of
farm efficiency, a precise laboratory scientist where precision and
adherence to microscopic fact are absolute requirements.

And I sit here in the warm afternoon, in Murderers' Row, and cease from
the writing of my memoirs to listen to the soothing buzz of flies in the
drowsy air, and ca