Stella raised herself drowsily. "Yeh, dis is Jim." She looked at the girl fearfully, a vague horror channelling her face. "Is Will daid too?" "Will's all right.... You come home with me." Stella faced the girl when they were outside. "Will all right? Babe all right?" Diana nodded. "What's wrong wid yo' arm, girl?" "Nothin'. A pane of glass scratched it. It's all right." Jim's funeral, the Sunday following, was a notable affair. A committee of fellow-members from the union marched first. The ornately rosetted Brethren of the Morning Star, and the proud ranks of the Sons and Daughters of Ancient Galilean Fishermen, came next. Last were the comfortably filled livery carriages, furnished by the lodges as the proper foil for their flamboyant officers. Stella brought out her old black silk, in sorrow and pride. Tom's successor, Brother Adams, preached the funeral sermon. "God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform," was the burden of sermon and song. There was no suggestion among the elder heads that the devil, or the Birrell-Florence-Mountain Mining Company, had had a hand in this particular wonder, this harvest of dumb death. Tom, busied with funeral sermons for other victims, received gratefully the benefits from the two lodges. "Ain't dar nothin' f'um dat union Jim set sech store on?" "Unions don't have benefits, paw. We gwine ter git our benefit strikin'," explained Will painfully. "Lots of use dey are, den! Whuffur you belong to su'thin' what ain't got no benefits?" Diana and Stella sided with the father, but the boys were determined. "Dey say de comp'ny ain't gwine pay no damages for killin' de miners. We gwine strike an' _make_ 'em pay!" insisted Will. "We gotter git money somehow, ain't we?" said Ed, grouchily. "Dat's foolishness," argued Tom. "How you think you gwinter make white folks do what dey don't want to, huh? Dis union business is foolishness." The unusual excitement of several sermons a day brought on an attack of Tom's old sickness. At Paul Judson's suggestion, he walked himself over, one boiling afternoon, to the free ward of the "horse-pittle." Less than two weeks after his limping departure, old Peter accosted Mary Judson respectfully, as she stepped into her electric at the side door of Hillcrest. "Ole Tom Cole's done for dis time, Miss' Mary." "Yes, Peter? Are you sure?" "Dey cut him open in de horse-pittle, an' he's dead sho'. A nigger what wu'k dar done tol' me." Stella was close-lipped about the matter. "Dey do say he is daid dis time, Miss' Mary. Too much preachin' ain't nacheral." Diana saw, for the fourth time, the slouching figure in the dusk of the mountain roadway, as she returned that night from the big house. She came up to him with certainty, by now used to the mixed menace of his presence. "What are you hangin' around me for, Jim Hewin?" "You know what I want, brown baby. Aw, don't be so damn' stingy!"