Farther out stood a log house with a clapboard roof and a chimney built halfway up with stone and finished with crossed sticks, daubed with yellow clay. Behind it was a garden inclosed with palings split out of long cuts of hickory timber. Midway between the garden and the house, opposite the door, was a whitewashed well curb. From a long pole, suspended in a forked tree on a round locust pin, hung a sapling fastened to a bucket. Everything about the little farm was well kept. The chimney and the palings were whitewashed, the fence was well laid up, the bit of land was clean. Midway in the meadow, a path entered through wooden bars and ran along inside the rail fence to the house. There was a little crowd of some half dozen men standing about these bars, when the woman and child came up. The woman stopped in the road. “What are you all standin' around for?” she said. The men did not immediately reply. Finally one of them answered. “We're waitin' for the preacher to come.” The woman looked at the apparently vacant house. The door open. The sun lying on the threshold. “There's a-plenty to do, till he gits here,” she said. “Somebody's got to dig a grave, an' somebody's got to make a coffin.” The man leaning against the bar post, who had spoken for the others, now jerked his head toward the meadow'. “It's dug,” he said. The woman looked in the direction he indicated; a pile of fresh earth lay heaped up in the meadow', not between the two trees, but below' them, some paces from the summit. “Well,” said the woman, “you didn't pick out the place I'd a picked; I'd a put it on the ridge between them two trees, that's the natural place for it, there couldn't be no grander place. Who did you think you was savin' that place for? It looks like you was puttin' ole Nicholas so he'd be at the foot of somebody else that you was a-goin' to bury.” “We didn't pick the place,” said the man. “Who done it?” “We don't know who done it, the grave was dug when we got here.” The conversation was interrupted by the little girl. “There comes the preacher,” she said. The woman turned and looked down the road in the direction from which she had just come. CHAPTER V |A MAN driving a country buggy was approaching. He was a tall, spare man, in a suit of black ready-made clothes that seemed not to fit him in any place, and to be a cheap imitation of a clergyman's frock suit. He wore cotton gloves. At his feet was a shiny handbag made of some inexpensive material to imitate alligator skin. His hair and his heavy, drooping mustache were black. His face was narrow, the cheek bones high, the mouth straight. One of the man's eyes was partly grown over with a cataract, and his effort to see equally with that eye gave him a curious, squinting expression. He pulled up on the roadside, got out, tied his horse to a fence rail with one of the lines, took out his handbag, and came over to the little group waiting by the bars.