THE POST-MORTEM MURDER 3 bage-board carved in a walrus-tusk, a Chinese screen of washed-out gold pa- godas on faded, weary black We climbed a narrow stair over which jut- ted, like a secret trap-door, the comer of a mysterious chamber above. My companion opened a door on the upper hall and croaked, "In there/* I went in slowly. I am not sure now, after two years, but I think I planned to run out again, to flee down-
- stairs, to defend myself with that
ivory tusk if I should be attacked by- whatever was lurking in that shadowy, silent place. As I edged in, about me crept an odor of stale air and vile medi- cines and ancient linen. The shutters were fast ; the light was grudging. I was actually relieved when I saw in the four-poster bed a pitiful, vellum-faced old man, and the worst monster I had to face was normal illness. I have learned that Byron Sanders was only seventy-one then, but he seemed ninety. He was enormous. He must have been hard to care for. His shoulders, in the mended linen nightgown thrust up above the patch- work comforter, were bulky; his neck was thick; his head a shiny dome — an Olympian, majestic even in disso- lution. The room had been lived in too long. It was a whirl of useless things: stag- gering chairs, clothes in piles, greasy medicine-bottles, and a vast writing- desk pouring out papers, and dingy books with bindings of speckled brown. Amid the litter, so still that she seemed part of it, I was startled to discern another woman. Who she may have been I have never learned. The man was ponderously turning in bed, peering at me through the shaky light. "You are a professor?" he wheezed. "That depends upon what you mean, sir. I teach English. I am not—-" "You understand poetry, essays, literary history?" "I am supposed to." "I 'm kind of a colleague of yours. Byron—" He stopped, choked fright- fully. The repressed woman beside the bed, moving with stingy patience, wiped his lips. "My name is Byron Sanders. For forty years, till a year ago, I edited the 'Kennuit Beacon/" The nauseating vanity of man! In that reverent hour, listening to the en- treaties of a dying man, I was yet piqued at having my stripped ath- letic scholarship compared to editing the "Beacon," with its patent-medi- cine advertisements, its two straggly columns of news about John Brown's cow and Jim White's dory. His eyes trusting me, Byron Sanders went on : "Can't last long. It 's come quicker — no time to plan, I want you to take the literary remains of my father. He was not a good man, but he was a genius. I have his poetry here, and the letters. I have n't read them for years, and — too late-— give them to world. You must — " He was desperately choking. The still woman crept up, thrust into my hands a box of papers and a pile of note-books which had been lying on the bed. "You must go," she muttered. "Say, 'Yes/ and go. He can't stand any more." "Will you?" the broken giant wailed to me, a stranger! "Yes, yes, indeed; I Tl give them to the world/' I mumbled, while the woman pushed me toward the door. I fled down the stairs, through the coppery pine-woods, up to the blithe
