It's all very well to peck along, hand-to-mouth fashion. You can manage a living of sorts; and farm produce, even scanty, unskillfully contrived, and the charity of relatives, and the patience of tradesmen, will see you through. But a funeral--that's different! Undertaker--that means money. Was it possible that the sordid epic of their lives must be capped by the crowning insult, the Poormaster and the Pauper's Field? If only poor Paw could have waited a little before he claimed the spotlight--until prices fell a little or Nat got back with that "long green"! Maw swallowed her bitter pill. She went to see Uncle Clem and ask! And Uncle Clem was kind. "He'll buy a casket--he's willin' fur that--an' send a wreath and pay fur notices, an' even half on a buryin' lot; but he said he couldn't do no more. The high cost has hit him too.... An' where are we to git the rest? He said--at the last--it might be better all round fur us to take what Ellick Flick would gimme outen the Poor Fund--" Maw hadn't been able to go on for a spell. A pauper's burial for Paw! Surely Maw would manage better than that! She tried to find a better way that very night. "This farm's mortgaged to the neck; but I calculate Ben Travis won't care if I'm a mind to put Paw in the south field. It hain't no mortal good fur anything else, anyhow; an' he can lay there if we want. It's a real pleasant place. An' I can git the preacher myself--I'll give him the rest o' the broilers; an' they's seasoned hickory plankin' in the lean-to. Tom, you come along with me." All night Luke had lain and listened to the sound of big Tom's saw and hammer. Tom was real handy if you told him how--and Maw would be showing him just how to shape it all out. Each hammer blow struck deep on the boy's heart. Maw lined the home-made box herself with soft old quilts, and washed and dressed her dead herself in his faded outlawed wedding clothes. And on a morning soft and sweet, with a hint of rain in the air, they rode down in the farm wagon to the south field together--Paw and Maw and Luke--with big Tom walking beside the aged knobby horse's head. Abel Gazzam, a neighbor, had seen to the grave; and in due course the little cavalcade reached the appointed spot inside the snake fence--a quiet place in a corner, under a graybeard elm. As Maw had said, it was "a pleasant place for Paw to lay in." There were some old neighbors out in their own rigs, and Uncle Clem had brought his family up in his car, with a proper wreath; and Reverend Kearns came up and--declining all lien on the broilers--read the burial service, and spoke a little about poor Paw. But it wasn't a funeral, no how. No supper; no condolence; no viewing "the remains"--not even a handshake! Maw didn't even look at her old friends, riding back home between Tom and Luke, with her head fiercely high in the air.