, though
the end was not yet promising. When we turned to go towards the house
again, a man lounged out of the trees towards us. He looked at me, then
at Roscoe, and said:

"I'm Phil Boldrick's pal from Danger Mountain." Roscoe held out his
hand, and the man took it, saying: "You're The Padre, I suppose, and
Phil was soft on you. Didn't turn religious, did he? He always had a
streak of God A'mighty in him; a kind of give-away-the-top-of-your-head
chap; friend o' the widow and the orphan, and divvy to his last crust
with a pal. I got your letter, and come over here straight to see that
he's been tombed accordin' to his virtues; to lay out the dollars
he left me on the people he had on his visitin' list; no loafers, no
gophers, not one; but to them that stayed by him I stay, while prog and
liquor last."

I saw Roscoe looking at him in an abstracted way, and, as he did not
reply, I said: "Phil had many friends and no enemies." Then I told him
the tale of his death and funeral, and how the valley mourned for him.

While I spoke he stood leaning against a tree, shaking his head and
listening, his eyes occasionally resting on Roscoe with a look as
abstracted and puzzled as that on Roscoe's face. When I had finished he
drew his hand slowly down his beard and a thick sound came from behind
his fingers. But he did not speak.

Then I suggested quietly that Phil's dollars could be put to a better
use than for prog and liquor.

He did not reply to this at all; but after a moment's pause, in which
he seemed to be studying the gambols of a squirrel in a pine tree, he
rubbed his chin nervously, and more in soliloquy than conversation said:
"I never had but two pals that was pals through and through. And one was
Phil and the other was Jo--Jo Brackenbury."

Here Roscoe's hand, which had been picking at the bark of a poplar,
twitched suddenly.

The man continued: "Poor Jo went down in the 'Fly Away' when she swung
with her bare ribs flat before the wind, and swamped and tore upon
the bloody reefs at Apia.... God, how they gnawed her! And never a rag
holdin' nor a stick standin', and her pretty figger broke like a tin
whistle in a Corliss engine. And Jo Brackenbury, the dandiest rip,
the noisiest pal that ever said 'Here's how!' went out to heaven on a
tearing sea."

"Jo Brackenbury--" Roscoe repeated musingly. His head was turned away
from us.

"Yes, Jo Brackenbury; and Captain Falchion said to me" (I wonder that
I did not s