told so casually about the drowned man and the turtles—sharks it would probably be that would worry his lean carcass. The smile was rather gruesome that twisted Jamie’s face when he reflected that his sharks would not find much nourishment in bone and muscle. Then he carried the thought a trifle further and reflected that the muscle would likely be fairly tender. He might make a mouthful for something.
Then up, big and bright, before his eyes popped that childish enumeration of the kinds of death, and the description of the little old lady who had lain on the spread of lavender satin covered with delicate lace, the beloved lady who softly and gently had gone to sleep in the night without even lifting her folded hands and who carried to her grave a look on her face that the little Scout had described as “a smiling secret.” There was in this child the paganism, the frankness, the cruelty of childhood. (What was it La Fontaine had said about children? That all of them were brutally frank, brutally cruel?) Large streaks of cruelty had been discernible in the little Scout, but not so large as the streaks of generosity, of tenderness, of the love of fair dealing. Jamie could see the grimy palm in which buttons and strings and sinkers and corks and buckles were pushed around to find the coins that went to pay for a treat for the Master.
Then, too, there had been in the back of the head of the little Scout the penetration to fathom the look on the face of the sleeping woman. Jamie reflected that if he purposely went down to the crags of the Pacific and threw
