slid
in there just after you come off, and set on the porch and begun his
palaver. He has a different way with women than he has with men. He
seems to know that women are soft on some lines, and chiefly on
preachin' and buryin'. He'd picked up a list of folks round about here
that had lost kin, and he had me and Jane down on it on account of Dick.
Now, it seems that when he gits to a place he goes to the graveyard and
looks for stones to tally with his dead list, and when he don't find any
he makes a note of it; so, you see, havin' Dick's name down, an' not
knowin' the full particulars, he hunted us up, thinkin' we was
unsupplied in his line. So, you see, that's why he made sech a leech of
hisse'f on our porch."

"Huh, I see," Henley frowned--"I see."

"I can't begin to describe all the chap done or said," Wrinkle resumed.
"He riz and walked and ranted, an' prayed an' sung an' mighty nigh
called up mourners. I thought them two women would bust out cryin' once
or twice, but they belt in tiptop through the hottest of the wrangle.
Then I thought I'd put a stop to it, and I up and told him, I did, that
he'd made a mistake, an' that we didn't need a thing of the sort--that
Dick's body never was recovered, and so on. Then what do you think? The
skunk was actually flabbergasted, and didn't know what to say. But he
was game, and knowed thar was some way out of his trouble. He said,
'Wait a minute--don't bother me!' an' he shet his eyes tight, an' set
thar with his head hangin' down for fully five minutes. Then he looked
up an' said, 'I was jest tryin' to recall the good lady's name that had
the same trouble, pine blank, as your'n, but it slips me somehow.' An'
with that he said it was the custom all over civilized Christendom, in
such cases as our'n, to erect a suitable monument jest the same, havin'
a plot the right length an' width set aside, with both head and foot
rock, and, if a sermon hadn't been preached already, one ought to be on
the day the stone was put in place an' consecrated. I 'lowed sure them
women would see how plumb silly it was, but they listened like they was
gittin' the only directions to the Golden Shore, and begun to look at
the pictures in his book like they thought the skunk was savin' 'em from
death, destruction, an' disgrace."

"You don't mean to tell me they actually went and ordered--" Henley
began, but his voice trailed away into indistinctness. He could only
stare at his tormentor hopelessly.