tern was
kept hanging over Mr. Shimerda's head. Antonia and Ambrosch and the
mother took turns going down to pray beside him. The crazy boy went with
them, because he did not feel the cold. I believed he felt cold as much
as anyone else, but he liked to be thought insensible to it. He was
always coveting distinction, poor Marek!

Ambrosch, Jake said, showed more human feeling than he would have
supposed him capable of, but he was chiefly concerned about getting a
priest, and about his father's soul, which he believed was in a place
of torment and would remain there until his family and the priest had
prayed a great deal for him. 'As I understand it,' Jake concluded, 'it
will be a matter of years to pray his soul out of Purgatory, and right
now he's in torment.'

'I don't believe it,' I said stoutly. 'I almost know it isn't true.' I
did not, of course, say that I believed he had been in that very kitchen
all afternoon, on his way back to his own country. Nevertheless, after
I went to bed, this idea of punishment and Purgatory came back on me
crushingly. I remembered the account of Dives in torment, and shuddered.
But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich and selfish: he had only been so
unhappy that he could not live any longer.

XV

OTTO FUCHS GOT back from Black Hawk at noon the next day. He reported
that the coroner would reach the Shimerdas' sometime that afternoon,
but the missionary priest was at the other end of his parish, a hundred
miles away, and the trains were not running. Fuchs had got a few hours'
sleep at the livery barn in town, but he was afraid the grey gelding had
strained himself. Indeed, he was never the same horse afterward. That
long trip through the deep snow had taken all the endurance out of him.

Fuchs brought home with him a stranger, a young Bohemian who had taken
a homestead near Black Hawk, and who came on his only horse to help his
fellow countrymen in their trouble. That was the first time I ever saw
Anton Jelinek. He was a strapping young fellow in the early twenties
then, handsome, warm-hearted, and full of life, and he came to us like
a miracle in the midst of that grim business. I remember exactly how he
strode into our kitchen in his felt boots and long wolfskin coat,
his eyes and cheeks bright with the cold. At sight of grandmother, he
snatched off his fur cap, greeting her in a deep, rolling voice which
seemed older than he.

'I want to thank you very much, Mrs. Burden, for t