Jim Bunion leaning over the table with his breath in my face nodded his head several times and was silent.

I began to question him then.  Did they play chess as far away as Cuba?  He said they all did.  Was it conceivable that any man would make such a bargain as Snyth made?  Wasn’t the trick well known?  Wasn’t it in hundreds of books?  And if he couldn’t read books mustn’t he have heard from sailors that it is the Devil’s commonest dodge to get souls from silly people?

Jim Bunion had leant back in his own chair quietly smiling at my questions but when I mentioned silly people he leaned forward again, and thrust his face close to mine and asked me several times if I called Bill Snyth silly.  It seemed that these three sailors thought a great deal of Bill Snyth and it made Jim Bunion angry to hear anything said against him.  I hastened to say that the bargain seemed silly though not of course the man who made it; for the sailor was almost threatening, and no wonder for the whiskey in that dim tavern would madden a nun.

When I said that the bargain seemed silly he smiled again, and then he thundered his fist down on the table and said that no one had ever yet got the best of Bill Snyth and that that was the worst bargain for himself that the Devil ever made, and that from all he had read or heard of the Devil he had never been so badly had before as the night when he met Bill Snyth at the inn in the thunderstorm in Cuba, for Bill Snyth already had the damndest soul at sea; Bill was a good fellow, but his soul was damned right enough, so he got the crystal for nothing.

Yes, he was there and saw it all himself, Bill Snyth in the Spanish inn and the candles flaring, and the Devil walking in and out of the rain, and then the bargain between those two old hands, and the Devil going out into the lightning, and the thunderstorm raging on, and Bill Snyth sitting chuckling to himself between the bursts of the thunder.

But I had more questions to ask and interrupted this reminiscence.  Why did they all three always play together?  And a look of something like fear came over Jim Bunion’s face; and at first he would not speak.  And then he said to me that it was like this; they had not paid for that crystal, but got it as their share of Bill Snyth’s kit.  If they had paid for it or given something in exchange to Bill Snyth that would have been all right, but they couldn’t do that now because Bill was dead, and they were not sure if the old bargain might not hold good.  And Hell must be a large and lonely place, and to go there alone must be bad, and so the three agreed that they would all stick together, and use the crystal all three or not at all, unless one died, and then the two would use it and the one that was gone would wait for them.  And the last of the three to go would take the crystal with him, or maybe the crystal would bring him.  They didn’t think, they said, they were the kind of men for Heaven, and he hoped they knew their place better than that, but they didn’t fancy the notion of Hell alone, if Hell it had to be.  It was all right for Bill Snyth, he was afraid of nothing.  He had known perhaps five men that were not afraid of death, but Bill Snyth was not afraid of Hell.  He died with a smile on his face like a child in its sleep; it was drink killed poor Bill Snyth.