The slate stone that marked the soldier’s grave still stood erect. One could read every word carved upon it. Its willow tree wept in a perennial freshness of stem and leaf. The cherub and skull and crossbones had not turned a hair. But the more pretentious marble slab placed over the warrior’s relict, Thanksgiving Burton, was altogether a weaker vessel; at least, its foundations were less sure. It had lately fallen down flat under the hilltop winds, and in falling, had laid low a part of the slender iron fence that enclosed the graves of those early Burtons; Burtons who had wrestled with that soil and conquered it, until the soil, in turn, conquered them. The fugitive who had lately read to the boy Royal sonorous words of the twelve youths of Troy felt strangely dizzy as he pondered on the carven tribute to his ancestor. It began, as he well remembered, “A soldier of the Revolution and of God.” Dizzy as he was, he would like to recite the whole of that inscription, with the proper emphasis, for the youngster’s benefit. Where was the kid, that little Lord Bountiful, “a traveller like myself”? Oh, yes, he remembered now, but with immense, overpowering difficulty. The boy had vanished, fled away on the wings of an Iliad. “A soldier of the Revolution,”—but the words he was staring at were dizzier than himself. Hell, they must be, whirling so! Blindly throwing out an arm, he stumbled and fell, his hand striking the fallen marble slab in memory of Thanksgiving Burton. Like Royal, he had for the present reached the end of his appointed rounds. VI Below, just beyond a fork in the dusty stage-road, Remy Mariette, commissioner of highways, was finishing his day’s work of filling with gravel the deeper ruts and holes. He was a lithe, brown, ruddy-cheeked young man, known far and wide as a great worker, whether alone or in company. To-day he was alone. It happened that he was not only road commissioner, road laborer, mason, and the best bass of the choir; he was also the village constable. In the inner pocket of his frayed working coat was the secret warrant for the taking of Gerald Bertello. That document had been very much on his mind for the past few days, because, as he himself expressed it, “constabling was a new job for him.” However, he was not thinking, just then, of the cares of his office. He was thinking that before going home, he had plenty of time to skip up the hill and see whether the old gravestones were as badly off as reported at the last town meeting. If so, it meant another job for him; a good one, too, at mason’s wages. He swung briskly up the slope, his crowbar as staff. He might need it to pry at the fallen stone. Well, well, a man asleep. Queer place to choose. Drunk, perhaps? Hey, there, you man asleep!