Short Stories, vol 13 | Page 5

breathing hard, his eyes aflame, his long beard agitated, like rippling water, and he hurled blasphemies in an unknown language, extending his skinny arms in order to prevent the priest from entering.
The priest attempted to speak, offered his purse and his aid, but the old man kept on abusing him, making gestures with his hands as if throwing; stones at him.
Then the priest retired, followed by the curses of the beggar.
The companion of old Judas died the following day. He buried her himself, in front of her door. They were people of so little account that no one took any interest in them.
Then they saw the man take his pigs out again to the lake and up the hillsides. And he also began begging again to get food. But the people gave him hardly anything, as there was so much gossip about him. Every one knew, moreover, how he had treated the priest.
Then he disappeared. That was during Holy Week, but no one paid any attention to him.
But on Easter Sunday the boys and girls who had gone walking out to the lake heard a great noise in the hut. The door was locked; but the boys broke it in, and the two pigs ran out, jumping like gnats. No one ever saw them again.
The whole crowd went in; they saw some old rags on the floor, the beggar's hat, some bones, clots of dried blood and bits of flesh in the hollows of the skull.
His pigs had devoured him.
"This happened on Good Friday, monsieur." Joseph concluded his story, "three hours after noon."
"How do you know that?" I asked him.
"There is no doubt about that," he replied.
I did not attempt to make him understand that it could easily happen that the famished animals had eaten their master, after he had died suddenly in his hut.
As for the cross on the wall, it had appeared one morning, and no one knew what hand traced it in that strange color.
Since then no one doubted any longer that the Wandering Jew had died on this spot.
I myself believed it for one hour.

THE LITTLE CASK
He was a tall man of forty or thereabout, this Jules Chicot, the innkeeper of Spreville, with a red face and a round stomach, and said by those who knew him to be a smart business man. He stopped his buggy in front of Mother Magloire's farmhouse, and, hitching the horse to the gatepost, went in at the gate.
Chicot owned some land adjoining that of the old woman, which he had been coveting for a long while, and had tried in vain to buy a score of times, but she had always obstinately refused to part with it.
"I was born here, and here I mean to die," was all she said.
He found her peeling potatoes outside the farmhouse door. She was a woman of about seventy-two, very thin, shriveled and wrinkled, almost dried up in fact and much bent but as active and untiring as a girl. Chicot patted her on the back in a friendly fashion and then sat down by her on a stool.
"Well mother, you are always pretty well and hearty, I am glad to see."
"Nothing to complain of, considering, thank you. And how are you, Monsieur Chicot?"
"Oh, pretty well, thank you, except a few rheumatic pains occasionally; otherwise I have nothing to complain of."
"So much the better."
And she said no more, while Chicot watched her going on with her work. Her crooked, knotted fingers, hard as a lobster's claws, seized the tubers, which were lying in a pail, as if they had been a pair of pincers, and she peeled them rapidly, cutting off long strips of skin with an old knife which she held in the other hand, throwing the potatoes into the water as they were done. Three daring fowls jumped one after the other into her lap, seized a bit of peel and then ran away as fast as their legs would carry them with it in their beak.
Chicot seemed embarrassed, anxious, with something on the tip of his tongue which he could not say. At last he said hurriedly:
"Listen, Mother Magloire--"
"Well, what is it?"
"You are quite sure that you do not want to sell your land?"
"Certainly not; you may make up your mind to that. What I have said I have said, so don't refer to it again."
"Very well; only I think I know of an arrangement that might suit us both very well."
"What is it?"
"Just this. You shall sell it to me and keep it all the same. You don't understand? Very well, then follow me in what I am going to say."
The old woman left off peeling potatoes and looked at the innkeeper attentively from under her heavy eyebrows, and he went on:
"Let me explain myself. Every month I will