“My friend,” said Flambeau, turning in a kind of fury, “what does all that snuff mean?”

“My friend,” replied Brown, with equal seriousness, “there is one mark of all genuine religions:  materialism.  Now, devil-worship is a perfectly genuine religion.”

They had come up on the grassy scalp of the hill, one of the few bald spots that stood clear of the crashing and roaring pine forest.  A mean enclosure, partly timber and partly wire, rattled in the tempest to tell them the border of the graveyard.  But by the time Inspector Craven had come to the corner of the grave, and Flambeau had planted his spade point downwards and leaned on it, they were both almost as shaken as the shaky wood and wire.  At the foot of the grave grew great tall thistles, grey and silver in their decay.  Once or twice, when a ball of thistledown broke under the breeze and flew past him, Craven jumped slightly as if it had been an arrow.

Flambeau drove the blade of his spade through the whistling grass into the wet clay below.  Then he seemed to stop and lean on it as on a staff.

“Go on,” said the priest very gently.  “We are only trying to find the truth.  What are you afraid of?”

“I am afraid of finding it,” said Flambeau.

The London detective spoke suddenly in a high crowing voice that was meant to be conversational and cheery.  “I wonder why he really did hide himself like that.  Something nasty, I suppose; was he a leper?”

“Something worse than that,” said Flambeau.

“And what do you imagine,” asked the other, “would be worse than a leper?”

“I don’t imagine it,” said Flambeau.

He dug for some dreadful minutes in silence, and then said in a choked voice, “I’m afraid of his not being the right shape.”

“Nor was that piece of paper, you know,” said Father Brown quietly, “and we survived even that piece of paper.”

Flambeau dug on with a blind energy.  But the tempest had shouldered away the choking grey clouds that clung to the hills like smoke and revealed grey fields of faint starlight before he cleared the shape of a rude timber coffin, and somehow tipped it up upon the turf.  Craven stepped forward with his axe; a thistle-top touched him, and he flinched.  Then he took a firmer stride, and hacked and wrenched with an energy like Flambeau’s till the lid was torn off, and all that was there lay glimmering in the grey starlight.

“Bones,” said Craven; and then he added, “but it is a man,” as if that were something unexpected.

“Is he,” asked Flambeau in a voice that went oddly up and down, “is he all right?”

“Seems so,” said the officer huskily, bending over the obscure and decaying skeleton in the box.  “Wait a minute.”

A vast heave went over Flambeau’s huge figure.  “And now I come to think of it,” he cried, “why in the name of madness shouldn’t he be all right?  What is it gets hold of a man on these cursed cold mountains?  I think it’s the black, brainless repetition; all these forests, and over all an ancient horror of unconsciousness.  It’s like the dream of an atheist.  Pine-trees and more pine-trees and millions more pine-trees—­”