cutting
reference to the granite statue in Smyrna's cemetery. "Ahoy, the
house, there!"

Mrs. Crymble had been hastening to the door, the sound of her suitor's
wagon-wheels summoning her. A glimpse of the tall figure in the yard,
secured past the leaves of the window geraniums, brought her out on
the run.

Mrs. Delora Crymble, whose natural stock of self-reliance had been
largely improved by twenty years of grass-widowhood, was not easily
unnerved.

But she staggered when searching scrutiny confirmed the dreadful
suspicion of that first glimpse through the geraniums. For
precaution's sake Cap'n Sproul still held Mr. Crymble by the
scrabbled cloth in the back of his coat, and that despairing
individual dangled like a manikin. But he braced his thin legs
stubbornly when the Cap'n tried to push him toward the porch.

"If married couples are goin' to act like this on judgment mornin',"
muttered the mediator, "it will kind o' take the edge off'm the
festivities. Say, you two people, why don't you hoorah a few times
and rush up and hug and kiss and live happy ever after?"

But as soon as Mrs. Crymble could get her thin lips nipped together
and her hands on her hips she pulled herself into her accustomed
self-reliant poise.

"It's you, is it, you straddled-legged, whittled-to-a-pick-ed
northin' of a clothes-pin, you? You've sneaked back to sponge on me
in your old age after runnin' off and leavin' me with a run-down farm
and mortgidge! After sendin' me a marked copy of a paper with your
death-notice, and after your will was executed on and I wore mournin'
two years and saved money out of hen profits to set a stun' in the
graveyard for you! You mis'sable, lyin' 'whelp o' Satan!"

"There wa'n't no lie to it," said Mr. Crymble, doggedly. "I did die.
I died three times--all by violent means. First time I froze to death,
second--"

"Let up on that!" growled the Cap'n, vigorously shaking Mr. Crymble.
"This ain't no dime-novel rehearsal. It's time to talk business!"

"You bet it's time to talk business!" affirmed the "widow." "I've
paid off the mortgidge on this place by hard, bone labor, and it's
willed to me and the will's executed, and now that you've been proved
dead by law, by swanny I'll make you prove you're alive by law before
you can set foot into this house."

"And I'll go and buy the law for you!" cried Batson Reeves, stripping
the blanket off his horse. "I'll drive straight to my brother
Alcander's law off