ing, searching for their dead. On
the fourth, just as dynamite was coming from the settlement to stir up
the river bottom with, they recovered the body of McDonald in Trout
Lake, some miles below. A team was sent to the nearest storehouse for
planks to make a coffin of. As they were hammering it together, the
body of his lost bunkie rose in the eddy just below the rapids, in
sight of the camp. So they made two boxes and buried them on the hill,
side by side. In death, as in life, they bunked together. Their
shoepacks they left at the foot of their graves, as I had found them,
and the pipe they smoked in common, to show that they were chums.

There was no priest and no time to fetch one. The rough woodsmen stood
around in silence, with the sunset glinting through the dark pines on
their bared heads. A swamp-robin in the brush made the responses. The
older men threw a handful of sand into each open grave. The one Roman
Catholic among them crossed himself devoutly: "God rest their souls."
"Amen!" from a score of deep voices, and the service was over. The men
went back to their perilous work, harder by so much to all of them
because two were gone.

The shadows were deepening in the woods; the roar of the rapids came
up from the river like a distant chant of requiem as Aleck finished
his story. Except that the drivers sent Morden's wife his month's pay
and raised sixty dollars among themselves to put with it, there was
nothing more to tell. The two silent mounds under the pines told all
the rest.

"Come," I said, "give me your knife;" and I cut in the cross on
McDonald's grave the letters I. H. S.

"What do they stand for?" asked Aleck, looking on. I told him, and
wrote under the name, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friends."

Aleck nodded. "Ay!" he said, "that's him."

JACK'S SERMON

Jack sat on the front porch in a very bad humor indeed. That was in
itself something unusual enough to portend trouble; for ordinarily
Jack was a philosopher well persuaded that, upon the whole, this was a
very good world and Deacon Pratt's porch the centre of it on
week-days. On Sundays it was transferred to the village church, and on
these days Jack received there with the family. If the truth were
told, it would probably have been found that Jack conceived the
services to be some sort of function specially designed to do him
honor at proper intervals, for he always received an extra