In Letters of Fire Page 3

  Of a sudden my hand is gripped in the vice I know so well. I look round. I am face to face with our host, who says to me in a voice which seems to come from another world:

  ‘Do not open it!’

  Next morning we did not ask our host to give us the opportunity of winning back our money. We fled from his roof without even taking leave of him. Twelve thousand francs were sent that evening to our strange host through Makoko’s father, to whom we had told our adventure. He returned them to us, with the following note:

  ‘We are quits. When we played, both the first game, which you won, and the second one, which you lost, we believed, you and I that we were staking twelve thousand francs. That must be sufficient for us. The devil has my soul, but he shall not possess my honour.’

  We were not at all anxious to keep the twelve thousand francs, so we presented them to a hospital in La Chaux-de-Fonds which was in sore need of money. Following upon urgent repairs, to which our donation was applied, the hospital, one winter’s night, was so thoroughly burned to the ground that at noon of the following day nothing but ashes remained of it.