I
In an upper room of an unoccupied dwelling in the part of San Francisco
known as North Beach lay the body of a man, under a sheet. The hour was
near nine in the evening; the room was dimly lighted by a single candle.
Although the weather was warm, the two windows, contrary to the custom
which gives the dead plenty of air, were closed and the blinds drawn
down. The furniture of the room consisted of but three pieces--an
arm-chair, a small reading-stand supporting the candle, and a long
kitchen table, supporting the body of the man. All these, as also the
corpse, seemed to have been recently brought in, for an observer, had
there been one, would have seen that all were free from dust, whereas
everything else in the room was pretty thickly coated with it, and there
were cobwebs in the angles of the walls.
Under the sheet the outlines of the body could be traced, even the
features, these having that unnaturally sharp definition which seems to
belong to faces of the dead, but is really characteristic of those only
that have been wasted by disease. From the silence of the room one would
rightly have inferred that it was not in the front of the house, facing
a street. It really faced nothing but a high breast of rock, the rear of
the building being set into a hill.
As a neighboring church clock was striking nine with an indolence which
seemed to imply such an indifference to the flight of time that one
could hardly help wondering why it took the trouble to strike at all,
the single door of the room was opened and a man entered, advancing
toward the body. As he did so the door closed, apparently of its own
volition; there was a grating, as of a key turned with difficulty, and
the snap of the lock bolt as it shot into its socket. A sound of
retiring footsteps in the passage outside ensued, and the man was to all
appearance a prisoner. Advancing to the table, he stood a moment looking
down at the body; then with a slight shrug of the shoulders walked over
to one of the windows and hoisted the blind. The darkness outside was
absolute, the panes were covered with dust, but by wiping this away he
could see that the window was fortified with strong iron bars crossing
it within a few inches of the glass and imbedded in the masonry on each
side. He examined the other window. It was the same. He manifested no
great curiosity in the matter, did not even so much as raise the sash.
If he was a prisoner he was apparently a tractable one. Having completed
his examination of the room, he seated himself in the arm-chair, took a
book from his pocket, drew the stand with its candle alongside and began
to read.
The man was young--not more than thirty--dark in complexion,
smooth-shaven, with brown hair. His face was thin and high-nosed, with a
broad forehead and a "firmness" of the chin and jaw which is said by
those having it to denote resolution. The eyes were gray and steadfast,
not moving except with definitive purpose. They were now for the greater
part of the time fixed upon his book, but he occasionally withdrew them
and turned them to the body on the table, not, apparently, from any
dismal fascination which under such circumstances it might be supposed
to exercise upon even a courageous person, nor with a conscious
rebellion against the contrary influence which might dominate a timid
one. He looked at it as if in his reading he had come upon something
recalling him to a sense of his surroundings. Clearly this watcher by
the dead was discharging his trust with intelligence and composure, as
became him.
After reading for perhaps a half-hour he seemed to come to the end of a
chapter and quietly laid away the book. He then rose and taking the
reading-stand from the floor carried it into a corner of the room near
one of the windows, lifted the candle from it and returned to the empty
fireplace before which he had been sitting.
A moment later he walked over to the body on the table, lifted the sheet
and turned it back from the head, exposing a mass of dark hair and a
thin face-cloth, beneath which the features showed with even sharper
definition than before. Shading his eyes by interposing his free hand
between them and the candle, he stood looking at his motionless
companion with a serious and tranquil regard. Satisfied with his
inspection, he pulled the sheet over the face again and returning to the
chair, took some matches off the candlestick, put them in the side
pocket of his sack-coat and sat down. He then lifted the candle from its
socket and looked at it critically, as if calculating how long it would
last. It was barely two inches long; in another hour he would be in
darkness. He replaced it in the candlestick and blew it out.