"That's it, that's it, like this!" exclaimed the servant in answer as he drew on the ground the figure of a Byzantine cross. "Were there flowers scattered on the grave?" "Oleanders and tuberoses and forget-me-nots, yes!" the servant added joyfully, offering the grave-digger a cigar. "Tell us which is the grave and where the cross is." The grave-digger scratched his ear and answered with a yawn: "Well, as for the cross, I burned it." "Burned it? Why did you burn it?" "Because the fat curate ordered me to do so." "Who is the fat curate?" asked Ibarra. "Who? Why, the one that beats people with a big cane." Ibarra drew his hand across his forehead. "But at least you can tell us where the grave is. You must remember that." The grave-digger smiled as he answered quietly, "But the corpse is no longer there." "What's that you're saying?" "Yes," continued the grave-digger in a half-jesting tone. "I buried a woman in that place a week ago." "Are you crazy?" cried the servant. "It hasn't been a year since we buried him." "That's very true, but a good many months ago I dug the body up. The fat curate ordered me to do so and to take it to the cemetery of the Chinamen. But as it was heavy and there was rain that night--" He was stopped by the threatening attitude of Ibarra, who had caught him by the arm and was shaking him. "Did you do that?" demanded the youth in an indescribable tone. "Don't be angry, sir," stammered the pale and trembling grave-digger. "I didn't bury him among the Chinamen. Better be drowned than lie among Chinamen, I said to myself, so I threw the body into the lake." Ibarra placed both his hands on the grave-digger's shoulders and stared at him for a long time with an indefinable expression. Then, with the ejaculation, "You are only a miserable slave!" he turned away hurriedly, stepping upon bones, graves, and crosses, like one beside himself. The grave-digger patted his arm and muttered, "All the trouble dead men cause! The fat padre caned me for allowing it to be buried while I was sick, and this fellow almost tore my arm off for having dug it up. That's what these Spaniards are! I'll lose my job yet!" Ibarra walked rapidly with a far-away look in his eyes, while the aged servant followed him weeping. The sun was setting, and over the eastern sky was flung a heavy curtain of clouds. A dry wind shook the tree-tops and made the bamboo clumps creak. Ibarra went bareheaded, but no tear wet his eyes nor did any sigh escape from his breast. He moved as if fleeing from something, perhaps the shade of his father, perhaps the approaching storm. He crossed through the town to the outskirts on the opposite side and turned toward the old house which he had not entered for so many years. Surrounded by a cactus-covered wall it seemed to beckon to him with its open windows, while the ilang-ilang waved its flower-laden branches joyfully and the doves circled about the conical roof of their cote in the middle of the garden.