“Oh, Rayburn!” he said, with such an awful effort at ease that I was impolite enough to laugh rudely in his face. “Oh, Rayburn!” said he, “come, let’s have done with this nonsense! Of course, I know it’s the fever and you’re not yourself; but collect yourself, man—give me that ridiculous weapon, now, and let’s go back and talk it over.”

“I will go back,” said I, “carrying your head with me. We will see how charmingly it can discourse when it lies in the basket at her door.”

“Come,” said he, persuasively, “I think better of you than to suppose that you try this sort of thing as a joke. But even the vagaries of a fever-crazed lunatic come some time to a limit. What is this talk about heads and baskets? Get yourself together and throw away that absurd cane-chopper. What would Miss Greene think of you?” he ended, with the silky cajolery that one would use towards a fretful child.

“Listen,” said I. “At last you have struck upon the right note. What would she think of me? Listen,” I repeated.

“There are women,” I said, “who look upon horsehair sofas and currant wine as dross. To them even the calculated modulation of your well-trimmed talk sounds like the dropping of rotten plums from a tree in the night. They are the maidens who walk back and forth in the villages, scorning the emptiness of the baskets at the doors of the young men who would win them. One, such as they,” I said, “is waiting. Only a fool would try to win a woman by drooling like a braggart in her doorway or by waiting upon her whims like a footman. They are all daughters of Herodias, and to gain their hearts one must lay the heads of his enemies before them with his own hands. Now, bend your neck, Louis Devoe. Do not be a coward as well as a chatterer at a lady’s tea-table.”

“There, there!” said Devoe, falteringly. “You know me, don’t you, Rayburn?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “I know you. I know you. I know you. But the basket is empty. The old men of the village and the young men, and both the dark maidens and the ones who are as fair as pearls, walk back and forth and see its emptiness. Will you kneel now, or must we have a scuffle? It is not like you to make things go roughly and with bad form. But the basket is waiting for your head.”

With that he went to pieces. I had to catch him as he tried to scamper past me like a scared rabbit. I stretched him out and got a foot on his chest, but he squirmed like a worm, although I appealed repeatedly to his sense of propriety and the duty he owed to himself as a gentleman not to make a row.

But at last he gave me the chance, and I swung the machete.

It was not hard work. He flopped like a chicken during the six or seven blows that it took to sever his head; but finally he lay still, and I tied his head in my handkerchief. The eyes opened and shut thrice while I walked a hundred yards. I was red to my feet with the drip, but what did that matter? With delight I felt under my hands the crisp touch of his short, thick, brown hair and close-trimmed beard.

I reached the house of the Greenes and dumped the head of Louis Devoe into the basket that still hung by the nail in the door-jamb. I sat in a chair under the awning and waited. The sun was within two hours of setting. Chloe came out and looked surprised.

“Where have you been, Tommy?” she asked. “You were gone when I came out.”

“Look in the basket,” I said, rising to my feet. She looked and gave a little scream—of delight, I was pleased to note.

“Oh, Tommy!” she said. “It was just what I wanted you to do. It’s leaking a little, but that doesn’t matter. Wasn’t I telling you? It’s the little things that count. And you remembered.”