It was a relief to her when they reached the fence, and he stepped out to help her down and tie his horse. There had been some uncertainty up to the last as to whether Preacher Drumright could be got for the occasion, but the sound of his voice from the press of calico-clad and jeans-covered shoulders and backs, reassured Flenton. "I'm mighty glad Drumright's thar," he said to Callista, as he lifted her down. "He'll preach Granny's funeral come Sunday, he said; but thar ain't anyone can pray like he can. I do love a good servigorous prayer." Callista's anxious eyes were searching the animals tethered about for sight of the two black horses that stepped together "like a couple of gals with their arms around each other's waists." At last she found them in the grove, and hastily turned with her escort to go through the gap in the fence to where the preacher was, where yawned [47] the open grave, and stood the coffin. A tangle of dewberry vines, with withering fruit on them, here and there, and beginning even in their mid-summer greenness to show russet and reddened leaves, scrambled all over the poor soil. Most of the graves were unmarked, some had a slab or block of wood; only here and there gleamed a small stone. Callista passed that of her father, good-looking, ne'er-do-well Race Gentry, whom the romantic young Octavia Luster had run away to marry. A honeysuckle vine covered it with a tangle of green, offering now its bunches of fawn and white, heavy-scented blossoms from a closely compacted mound. "I'm a-goin' to have a real monument put up for Granny," Flenton whispered to her as they went forward together. "I wish't she'd lived to be a hundred, so I could have put that on the stone; but we're mighty proud of her holdin' out to ninety." Quite against her will, Callista found herself taken up to the front of the gathering, placed between Ellen and Flenton Hands beside the coffin. Preacher Drumright was speaking with closed eyes; he had embarked on one of those servigorous prayers which Hands admired. The two girls, Ellen and Jane, were sobbing in long, dry gasps. After the prayer came a hymn, the lulls in the service being filled in by the sobs of the Hands [48] girls, little responsive moans from some woman in the assembly, and the purr of the wind in the young pines, where scared rabbits were hiding; and by the far, melodious jangle of Old Piedy's bell--Old Piedy, dispossessed and driven away. With the appearance of Callista and her escort on the scene, a young fellow who had been lying full length on the top of the ruining stone wall tilted his hat quite over his eyes and relaxed a certain watchfulness of demeanor which had till then been apparent in him. When the girl was finally ensconced in the middle of the lamenting Hands family, this person leaned down and whispered to Ola Derf, whose square little back was resting against the wall close beside him, "Come on, let's go. Haven't you had about enough of this?"