Out of the dusk the girl came. Her grace, her beauty, the endless dam of color, of emotion that flooded her face bewitched, unnerved the captain. In an attitude of respectful
indecision she paused at the door, one hand at her throat, the other held out to the captain. . . .
In one's mouth it savored of butter. Miss Buckner, there at the door, viewing the end of an embarrassing quest, felt happy. The captain, after all, was such a naughty boy!
Down on the carpetless porch, dipt in the brine of shadows, the hoarse, catching voice of an Englishman called. “Anesta, Anesta . . . mulatto girl . . . Gawd blarst the bleddy spiggoty to 'ell! Come to me, Anesta! So 'elp me Gawd if 'e goes artah 'er I'll cut the gizzard out . . . hey ... where's that bleddy Miss Buckner. . . ?”
Sore, briny silence. “And His word is mine. And the word was God, and all things made by Him, and God. . . . No. Gawd damn it, that isn't right. Jesus! . . ."
“And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not. . . .” Endless emotion. Swung up upon the shores of a spirit-sea, where the owls and saints and the shiny demons of the hideous morass emerged at the low tide to mate and war and converse on the imperishable odes of time . . . ghastly reality!
Scream . . . it touched no one. Doing its work at a swift, unerring pace. . . . A death-rattle, and the descent of shadows and solitude.
At noon the day after the cops came and got the body. Over the blood-black hump a sheet was flung. It ate up the scarlet. Native crowds stuck up their chins at it . . . even the tiny drip-drip on the piazza. From the dark roof hanging over the pavement it came. . . .
Way back—to be exact, a week after life moved on The Porch—a new white screen-cloth had been put together and pelted out that way. A slow, rigid procession of them. Now, its edge—that is the novelty of it—taken off, Miss Buckner,
