In Montmartre

In the Cafe Neant ("Nothingness"), Montmartre, Paris, a soul-sick traveler of life's rugged highway reclined beside a black coffin, gulped beer from a human skull. Amid their falsetto shrieks and groans, other travelers, pleasure-spent, raised skull-mugs to their fleshy lips, thwacked the coffin-lid, toyed with human bones--the femur, the tibia, the humerus. Waiters in the greasy black of undertakers made long faces, scurried about the skeleton hall, doing waiters' work. Maudlin antiquaries dilated upon the history of the ghoul-crooked relics.

The soul-sick one called for his bill. It was exorbitant. He seized a femur from the wall. With one blow he smote the waiter senseless to the floor; with another he felled a fellow-drinker who had rushed to the waiter's defense.

Riot galloped around the coffins. Crossbones churned the fetid air. The maitre fired his revolver. Gendarmes invaded the gloomy cave.

But when they had removed the two victims and others, battered and bruised by many a thump, they could not find the soul-sick hacker. The deep night and still night had swallowed him.