“Harve never could have handled stock none,” interposed the cattleman. “He hadn’t it in him to be sharp. Do you remember when he bought Sander’s mules for eight-year olds, when everybody in town knew that Sander’s father-in-law give ’em to his wife for a wedding present eighteen years before, an’ they was full-grown mules then?” The company laughed discreetly, and the Grand Army man rubbed his knees with a spasm of childish delight. “Harve never was much account for anything practical, and he shore was never fond of work,” began the coal and lumber dealer. “I mind the last time he was home; the day he left, when the old man was out to the barn helpin’ his hand hitch up to take Harve to the train, and Cal Moots was patchin’ up the fence; Harve, he come out on the step and sings out, in his lady-like voice: ‘Cal Moots, Cal Moots! please come cord my trunk.’” “That’s Harve for you,” approved the Grand Army man. “I kin hear him howlin’ yet, when he was a big feller in long pants and his mother used to whale him with a rawhide in the barn for lettin’ the cows git foundered in the cornfield when he was drivin’ ’em home from pasture. He killed a cow of mine that-a-way onct--a pure Jersey and the best milker I had, an’ the old man had to put up for her. Harve, he was watchin’ the sun set acrost the marshes when the anamile got away.” “Where the old man made his mistake was in sending the boy East to school,” said Phelps, stroking his goatee and speaking in a deliberate, judicial tone. “There was where he got his head full of nonsense. What Harve needed, of all people, was a course in some first-class Kansas City business college.” The letters were swimming before Steaven’s eyes. Was it possible that these men did not understand, that the palm on the coffin meant nothing to them? The very name of their town would have remained for ever buried in the postal guide had it not been now and again mentioned in the world in connection with Harvey Merrick’s. He remembered what his master had said to him on the day of his death, after the congestion of both lungs had shut off any probability of recovery, and the sculptor had asked his pupil to send his body home. “It’s not a pleasant place to be lying while the world is moving and doing and bettering,” he had said with a feeble smile, “but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we came from, in the end. The townspeople will come in for a look at me; and after they have had their say, I shan’t have much to fear from the judgment of God!” The cattleman took up the comment. “Forty’s young for a Merrick to cash in; they usually hang on pretty well. Probably he helped it along with whiskey.”