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Lest you shall forget we will show one other sign of our power to-morrow. La MANO NERA. The end of this ominous letter was gruesomely decorated with a skull and cross-bones, a rough drawing of a dagger thrust through a bleeding heart, a coffin, and, under all, a huge black hand. There was no doubt about the type of letter that it was.
On each side of her bow there was painted and the evening sun, shining through my larches, showed the paint still fresh in more or less accurate design in black, the emblem of a skull and cross-bones.
We had not as much as a fife-and-drum band. We did not know how to play a tin whistle or beat upon the tintinnabulum. We never waved a green flag. We had not a branch of any kind of a league. We had no men of skill to draft a resolution, indite a threatening letter, draw a coffin, skull, and cross-bones, fight a policeman, or even make a speech.
The latter vessel had been growing famous, multiplying her captures and cruelties; indeed, behaving little otherwise than if she carried the black flag with the skull and cross-bones.
Don't you think it would be a good plan to stick up a death's-head and cross-bones here and there, and to split up old coffin-lids for your setting-sticks, and get old Mowlders, the sexton, to bury your roots, and cover them in with a "dust to dust," and so forth, and plant a yew tree in the middle, and stick those bits of painted board, that look so woefully like gravestones, all round it, and then let old Tamar prowl about for a ghost?
Some people maintained that he was a mysterious person, and that no one ever entered his chamber, which was a regular anchorite's cell, furnished with winged hour-glasses and enlivened by cross-bones and skulls of dead men! This was much talked of, so that one of the elegant and malicious young women of M. sur M. came to him one day, and asked: "Monsieur le Maire, pray show us your chamber.
Shorty stood beside him for a moment, and then watched his opportunity, and pressed by him, to where he could see into the room. It was entirely dark except for the light of a single candle, shaded so that its rays fell upon a rude altar in the center of the room, draped with a rebel flag. Upon this lay a naked sword, skull and cross-bones.
"I'll tell you a secret. You are being stolen. The Isis is waiting in a little cove, and there is steam in her engines, and a chaplain on board. If it's necessary I shall run up the skull and cross-bones at her masthead. Do you hear?" Then, with a less piratical voice: "Dearest, I love you." She looked up drowsily into his eyes. "You don't have to be such a boa-constrictor," she suggested.
It was a threat couched in direful words, warning her and her friends not to go to Hollyhill on their charity mission, as announced, and predicting serious injury if not death to some of them. It was signed with a skull and cross-bones.
Then I let out Kaiser's collar two or three holes, tied the other ends of my ropes to each side of it, making them precisely like harness traces, and pushed out of the door and sat down on my new sled. I had like to have forgotten the letter on the door, but drew myself up and got it and put it in my pocket. There was a monstrous red skull and cross-bones on the outside of it.
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