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They say that there came a look into Joshua's eyes that none of them had ever seen before. He stood there for a moment, motionless and silent, and Rolldown, deceived by his attitude, was at him again. "You don't realize, man, or else you'd stop him!" "Oh, I'll stop him!" It was hardly above a breath. "I'll stop him!" And throwing his greatcoat over his shoulders, Joshua went out.
"You're a fool," he cried again, "if you don't know where Andrew is." "He's gone." "Gone, yes! And how you can say it like that, so calm God!" "I knew he was going," she said. "He told Rolldown he was going to other parts. But I knew it before that when he turned at the door and looked at me, Joshua.
Catching up I touched Rolldown's arm and shouted in his ear, over the roll of the wind and surf: "What you make of this, Rolldown?" He took it and felt it over, dropping half his rubbish in the act. He shook it. It seemed to me I could see his neck growing longer. "Got somethin' into it," he rumbled. "Yes, I know. Now let me have it back, Rolldown."
I'm glad there is no possibility of meeting her again as she was at thirty, and so making sure: I shall wish to remember her as the boy of sixteen saw her that night waiting in the dunes above the wreck of the "India ship," with Rolldown Nickerson bleating as he fled from the small, queer casket of polished wood he had flung on the sand, and the bridegroom peering out of the church window, over the moors in Urkey Village.
If the hour across the island seems a minute, the time I groped along the beach seems nights on end. And then one of the shades turned solid, and I was in such a case I had almost bolted before it spoke and I knew it for Rolldown Nickerson, the beachcomber. He was a good man in ways. But you must remember his business was a vulture's business, and something of it was in his soul.
It was Rolldown Nickerson, I saw as I wheeled; my forgotten enemy, flinging down the precious old brown casket he had robbed me of, and, still giving vent to that thin, high note of horror, careening, sliding, and spattering off down the sandslope. And as he vanished and his wail grew fainter around a shoulder of the dune, another sound came also to my ears.
She held it out in the light where all of us could see the thing Rolldown had discarded from his treasures, that I had picked up and been robbed of in the kindly dark the old brown casket-thing with the polished surfaces and the bits of intricate and ghastly carvings that had once let in the light of day and the sound of words the old, brown, sea-bitten, sand-scoured skull of Andrew Blake, with the two gold teeth in the upper jaw dulled by the tarnishing tides that had brought it up slowly from its bed in the bottom of the sea.
I'll tell you where we caught Rolldown. It was before the church, within the very outpouring of the colored windows. When Miah discovered who his blowing captive was his rage, for a moment, was something to remember. Then it passed and left him blank and dreary with defeat.
Their first hint of what was afoot they had when Rolldown Nickerson, the beachcomber, came running in, shining with the wet of the autumn gale that began that night. He wanted Joshua to look out for his brother. Being innocent of what had happened at the party, he thought Andrew had gone out of his head.
The rain had lessened, and a rising moon cast a ghost through the wrack, just enough to let us glimpse a figure topping a rise before us. That it was no one but Rolldown, still fleeing the mystery and bleating as he fled, made no difference to the blurred eyes of Miah; he dug his toes into the sand and flung forward in still hotter chase after a still-faster-speeding quarry.
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