he town three years, the anecdotes illustrating his
shiftlessness multiplied, and his name was a synonym for that trait of
character known in the vernacular as "no-'count." In the third spring,
after a winter's tussle with rheumatism, Perkins died. His funeral was
of so little importance that none of the corpulent old ladies in black
alpaca, holding their handkerchiefs carefully folded in their hands,
came panting across the town to attend it. No women came at all. And
the Perkins boy stood by stolidly while the dry clods were rumbling
upon the pine box in the grave. The boy wished to be alone, and he
would not sit on the seat with the driver. He wiped a little moisture
from his eyes, and rode to town with his feet hanging out of the back
of the wagon that had held the coffin.

[Illustration: _His feet hanging out of the back of the wagon that had
held the coffin_.]

When the wagon came to the thick of the town, Bud Perkins quietly slid
to the ground, and joined a group of afternoon idlers who were playing
marbles on the south side of a livery barn. Here and there in the
group a boy said: "H'lo, Bud," when the Perkins boy joined the
coterie, but many of the youngsters, being unfamiliar with the
etiquette of mourning, were silent, and played on at their game. When
the opportunity came the Perkins boy put a marble in the ring without
saying a word. He went back to "taws," and "lagged for goes," with
the others. He spoke only when he was addressed. A black sense of
desolation lowered over him, and he could not join in the ejaculations
and responses of the game. His luck was bad, and he lost marble after
marble. In an hour, when the sun was still in the south, he withdrew
from the game and sat alone against the barn, drawing figures on the
earth with a broken piece of hoop-iron. The boy could not fight off
the thought of the empty home waiting for him down by the river. He
saw, as he sat there, all the furniture, his father's clothes hanging
at the foot of the bed, the stove in disorder; and then he realized
that in the whole town not one hand was held out to him. He was a
child, yet the heartlessness of it all cut him to the quick. This
thought overwhelmed him, again and again, each time with more
agonizing force, like an increasing wave, and as one flood washed over
him with fiercer passion than the others, the boy rose hurriedly, ran
around the barn, and flung himself upon a pile of hay. There he gave
way to a storm of