did not know that could not
be again. He lay now, his limbs stretched out, his grizzly old head in
Bone's arms.

"Tell Dode I didn't fight. She'll be glad o' that. Thar's no blood on my
hands." He fumbled at his pocket. "My pipe? Was it broke when I fell?
Dody 'd like to keep it, mayhap. She allays lit it for me."

The moment's flash died down. He muttered once or twice, after
that,--"Dode,"--and "Lord Jesus,"--and then his eyes shut. That was all.

They had buried her dead out of her sight. They had no time for mourning
or funeral-making now. They only left her for a day alone to hide her
head from all the world in the coarse old waistcoat, where the heart
that had been so big and warm for her lay dead beneath,--to hug the
cold, haggard face to her breast, and smooth the gray hair. She knew
what the old man had been to her--now! There was not a homely way he had
of showing his unutterable pride and love for his little girl that did
not wring her very soul. She had always loved him; but she knew now how
much warmer and brighter his rough life might have been, if she had
chosen to make it so. There was not a cross word of hers, nor an angry
look, that she did not remember with a bitterness that made her sick as
death. If she could but know he forgave her! It was too late. She
loathed herself, her coldness, her want of love to him,--to all the
world. If she could only tell him she loved him, once more!--hiding her
face in his breast, wishing she could lie there as cold and still as he,
whispering, continually, "Father! Father!" Could he not hear? When they
took him away, she did not cry nor faint. When trouble stabbed Dode to
the quick, she was one of those people who do not ask for help, but go
alone, like a hurt deer, until the wound heals or kills. This was a loss
for life. Of course, this throbbing pain would grieve itself down; but
in all the years to come no one would take just the place her old father
had left vacant. Husband and child might be dearer, but she would never
be "Dody" to any one again. She shut the loss up in her own heart. She
never named him afterwards.

It was a cold winter's evening, that, after the funeral. The January
wind came up with a sharp, dreary sough into the defiles of the hills,
crusting over the snow-sweeps with a glaze of ice that glittered in the
pearly sunlight, clear up the rugged peaks. There, at the edge of them,
the snow fretted and arched and fell back in curling foam-wav