rments--this was the
wind busy among the drifting leaves.

The two men, who had finished the coffin by the light of a lantern,
carried it into the house and set it up against the wall while they ate
their evening meal. Then they took it to a table in the next room to put
the dead man in it. The girl and the dog went with them. They had
cushioned the box with coarse sacking filled with fragrant pine
tassels, but the girl took a thickly quilted cloth from her own bed and
lined it more carefully. They did not hinder her.

"We've made it a bit too big," said Saul; "that'll stop the shaking."

The corpse, according to American custom, was dressed in its clothes--a
suit of light grey homespun, such as is to be bought everywhere from
French-Canadian weavers. When they had lifted the body and put it in the
box, they stopped involuntarily to look, before the girl laid a
handkerchief upon the face. There lay a stalwart, grey-haired man--dead.
Perhaps he had sinned deeply in his life; perhaps he had lived as nobly
as his place and knowledge would permit--they could not tell. Probably
they each estimated what they knew of his life from a different
standpoint. The face was as ashen as the grey hair about it, as the grey
clothes the body wore. They stood and looked at it--those three, who
were bound to each other by no tie except such as the accident of time
and place had wrought. The dog, who understood what death was, exhibited
no excitement, no curiosity; his tail drooped; he moaned quietly against
the coffin.

Bates made an impatient exclamation and kicked him. The kick was a
subdued one. The wind-swept solitude without and the insistent presence
of death within had its effect upon them all. Saul looked uneasily over
his shoulder at the shadows which the guttering candle cast on the wall.
Bates handled the coffin-lid with that shrinking from noise which is
peculiar to such occasions.

"Ye'd better go in the other room," said he to Sissy. "It's unfortunate
we haven't a screw left--we'll have to nail it."

Sissy did not go. They had made holes in the wood for the nails as well
as they could, but they had to be hammered in. It was very
disagreeable--the sound and the jar. With each stroke of Saul's hammer
it seemed to the two workmen that the dead man jumped.

"There, man," cried Bates angrily; "that'll do."

Only four nails had been put in their places--one in each side. With
irritation that amounted to anger against Saul,