“I wa’n’t scared last night, and I ain’t likely to be now,” said Eph with a grin up at Ethan’s broad face. “That’s so. Shake hands. After all there is nothing little about you, Eph--except yourself.” The little fellow looked bigger after this grip of good fellowship and he piped up and began his story. “I was out last night,” he said. “It was near midnight I reckon. Most all the lights was out in the village and everything was quiet. I was out--out looking for something----” “He was out looking for his drunken old father,” whispered one of the boys, nudging his neighbor. “That’s Eph’s regular beat nights. He is afraid the old man will get run over, or get sunstruck by moonlight.” “Hush up, you,” said the boy addressed. “Eph isn’t to blame.” “I had been down by the cross-roads,” Eph went on. “You know where that is.” “I think it’s likely we do--there is where General Stark buried a traitor and staked him down with a crowbar,” said one. “For some time I didn’t hear anything,” Eph went on. “Then I heard something coming along slow and still on the old turnpike. It didn’t seem like a wagon at first, nothing about it rattled and squeaked natural-like for a wagon. There must have been lots of axle grease onto them wheels and that harness was oiled up and strapped up, I tell you, and if them horses had a had smart-weed drafts onto their hoofs they couldn’t have set ’em down more soft and quiet-like. When I saw that it was a wagon and that there wa’n’t no signs of a driver to it--for whatever was driving of it was flat on the bottom--then it came over me that they was a-bringing home somebody dead in that wagon----” “And the Remains was driving itself home, quiet and respectable-like, and conducting its own funeral--that’s accommodating now--I like that, go on,” interrupted Martin. “Of course,” Eph admitted, looking a little “sheepish.” “Of course there wa’n’t no sense in that--not by daylight. But that’s what I thought of then, and I was hot and cold all to onct, I tell you, and I streaked after that wagon, for I meant to get home to mother ahead of it. I got up to the court house and lay down flat in that clump of pines by the horse block, ’cause all the roads branch off from there and I could see which way it went next. There wa’n’t no moon last night, and precious few stars.