"We can let that go," replied Barnaby impatiently. "There's enough for me to do just now, and there does n't seem to be anyone else to do it."

"That's no excuse for your being here. was married, and you knew it."

That girl

“She's a widow now, anyway, and the town that's made her one leaves her alone with her dead, as if she were an outcast or a leper.”

"You seem much concerned

for her dead!"

"I'm concerned for her. I'm concerned too that there is a place on God's footstool that can stand unmoved by a tragedy of this kind.”

"If there's a lesson in his fate for others, I shall deal with it in its proper time. As for him, he died as the fool dieth. I have nothing more to do with him, or for him."

"Why, there's the funeral service," Barnaby reminded him.

"He had become as a heathen man and a publican, and had no future part with the people of God. Therefore, the church has no further part with him, nor have I, as its representative."

Barnaby drew closer to the speaker and sought to read in his face some sign that he spoke with less than his usual singleness. He found nothing in his cold fanaticism to encourage, but still he could not forbear further protest.

"But a prayer at his grave, surely."

"Why? To pray for the dead, which is an abomination in the sight of the Lord? To give thanks or his life, which has been a reproach and a scandal? To ask God to make it a warning to those who, like him, walk the way of death? I can do that at a more fitting time."

"But it is n't seemly, it is n't decent for a human being to go under ground as you would bury a dead dog!"

"Was his living seemly? Was it decent? Did he live as a human being or as a dog?" answered Craig passionately.

"But that is over, it is ended," Barnaby expostulated. "Yes, it is ended, and in the name of the seemly, you want a lying priest to stand at the grave and tell the world lies! What was abominable when he was living is not made seemly and decent by his death! Sin is sin, whether you believe it or not, and the sin of the dead man is not made righteousness by his death. If I speak at his grave, it will be with the words of truth, not lies, in my mouth. I am the apostle of Jesus Christ, not of the seemly and the decent that is content, if but the platter be clean without, to deny the ravening and wickedness of the inward abomination!"

CHAPTER XLIV

THE BURIAL

A

SHGRAVE was buried from the sugar camp, which Amanda refused to leave until after the burial. With the ingenuity of a woman for self torture, she convinced herself, for the time at least, that her refusals to marry him were the real cause of his later vagaries, and she set herself to the task of repentance, with the zeal of a convert momentarily sustained by feminine capacity for the illogical. She succeeded in making the few, who were ready to help her, thoroughly uncomfortable.

Her father and mother, insistent on her return home, refused to come near the camp, and in return she forbade Barnaby to accept for her anything in the way of food, or of means to lessen the dreariness of the camp, which they would not have denied. It was only by making an ally of Blanket that he prevented her carrying her martyrdom to the limit of hunger and the lack of a bed or even a chair to sit on. The sense of isolation from her kind was the craving of her instinct of remorse, and of this outward discomfort in the companionship of her dead was tangible sign and

evidence.

Barnaby found nothing in himself or his experience to illumine, much less explain, this phase of Amanda's shock and grief, and from the fact of the nonunderstandable argued the inexplicable.

"Women hain't like men," Blanket elucidated, when Barnaby in his perplexity appealed to him; "scurcely more 'n men air like women.

'em both humans."

It's a long guess tu call

Barnaby did not even understand, when the matter of the night was up, that it was a sense of pity for him, striving with her resentful alienation from her own, that forced from her a suggestion that her brothers should come and sleep before a fire of logs in front of the shanty. He went, however, on the errand and to the panicky refusal, especially on Tom's part, which he foresaw, and then made arrangements for himself and Blanket, under the pretence that the boys would not come until later in the evening. He hoped that she would fall asleep and so escape knowledge, at least until morning, that he Iwas the real watcher.

She was showing him a phase of character, the existence of which he had not before suspected, and which he studied with the curious inexperience of youth that has seen the other sex only when on its guard against itself and the instincts which civilisation has taught it to fear.

"I don't believe she ever loved Ashgrave," he said to Blanket, as they lay before the log fire wrapped in buffalo skins and feeling the comfort of warmth under the clear heavens, "but anybody who did n't know would never guess it."

"Women be cu'rus critters," Blanket expounded. "They be so tender hearted, it makes 'em twice as sorry not to be sorry as ef they war."

So she was grieving because she could not grieve. It was a new conception to Barnaby and he blessed Blanket for it. He wanted no further word on this, for it gave him all, and lest Blanket should be tempted

to enlarge, he hastened to change the subject, and found Craig the most apt as a new one.

"He's as heartless as a block of ice," he declared, after giving his companion an outline of his morning's visit to the clergyman.

"He's sorter ser'ous minded, fur a fac'," Blanket admitted.

"What do you suppose God makes such men for, anyway?"

"Fur pahsons, I guess. Leastwise they seem tu sorter drift that-a-way," Blanket answered.

Wearied as he was, for he had not slept since waking at the Junction on the morning of the previous day, the problem that Amanda offered was too perplexing for him to sleep. It was scarcely twenty-four hours since

she had owned again her love for him, yet this dead man, who had stood between them, overshadowed everything and stood more effectually between them than he had while living. From Blanket's wrappings came a drowsy question:

"Seein' what ye 've seen to-day, would ye advise me to merry the Widder Marlow?"

"Do you want to marry her?" asked Barnaby, irritated that this old question should perpetually ask itself.

“Wall, I vum, thet 's jest what I hain't never ben sartain erbout, try 's hard's I could tu make up my mind," Blanket admitted.

"Then you don't," asserted Barnaby, reading clearness in this state of mind at least.

"Wall, y' see," argued Blanket, tenacious of his point of view, "it's jest this-a-way. She's got nobody to look a'ter her, an' she 's got a nice bit o' money, an' it might turn out a comf'table sorter shelter a'ter I got too old fur the stage drivin'."